Student pisses off billionaire
He knows where Elon Musk’s private jet is: Teenie wants $ 50,000 to turn off his flight tracker
Tesla boss Elon Musk
© Patrick Pleul/ / Picture Alliance
A 19-year-old programmed a bot that documents every flight Elon Musk made on Twitter. The billionaire wants this to stop and has even offered him money – but the amount was too puny for the student.
It’s usually Elon Musk who drives the world around with his brash tweeting. In this case, however, it’s the other way around. A Florida teen has been teasing the founder of Tesla and SpaceX for months with a Twitter account that meticulously documents every takeoff and landing of Elon Musk’s private jet.
Jack Sweeney is the name of the 19-year-old who programmed the bot behind “@ElonJet”. The program reads more or less publicly accessible flight data and reports every take-off and landing of the billionaire pilot. Around 200,000 people follow the account, after all it provides information as to where the busy superstar entrepreneur could be right now.
Elon Musk offered $5,000, Sweeney wants ten times that
However, Elon Musk himself is not very enthusiastic about his private jet stalker. Months ago, the Tesla boss tried in vain to persuade Sweeney to switch off the account. This is reported by US media, citing chats between the billionaire and the student. Musk wrote to Sweeney for the first time last fall, “Can you take that down? It’s a security risk,” Musk wrote to Sweeney. “I don’t like the idea of being shot by a madman.”
In return, Musk agreed to pay Sweeney a small expense allowance of $5,000. But that must have been the moment when Sweeney looked at Musk’s bank balance. Instead of agreeing, he asked Musk for $50,000. As support for college and maybe even buying a Tesla Model 3, the student wrote.
According to CNN, $5,000 is far too little to outweigh the fun he is having. Most recently, Musk wrote in mid-January that he actually didn’t want to pay for the account to go away, prompting the cheeky Sweeney to suggest an internship as non-monetary consideration. Whether that will happen is uncertain, but the account is still online.
In addition, aviation fanatic Sweeney has a dozen other bots running, which track a Jeff Bezos jet and a Bill Gates jet, among others. Sweeney’s program combines various data that are all publicly available, he says. In this way, he can also track private planes whose movements are actually not public. Anyone who wants to complain about it should rather support a system that relies on more privacy for flight data, says Sweeney. In any case, deleting his account will not solve the problem, since others could rebuild the bot with its source code.
Sweeney also explained the principle of his program to Musk, of whom he is actually a big fan, in their private chats. The billionaire then apparently tried to better protect his jet set privacy. Sweeney announced on Friday that Musk is now using a method to block flight data. However, he was still able to locate the plane. On Sunday, the Elon jet went from California to Texas.
Sources: Protocol / CNN / Jack Sweeney / Elonjet