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According to an exclusive from Protocol, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk offered $5,000 to Jack Sweeney to shut down his Twitter account. The account is powered by a bot that tracks the billionaire's private jet and its flight plans.
Musk contacted Sweeney over Twitter DMs last fall. He requested the 19-year-old to delete the Twitter account called @ElonJet, which puts out regular updates over where the entrepreneur's flight is taking off and landing.
The 50-year-old CEO claimed the account was a security risk. As per Protocol, the DM revealed that Musk does not "love the idea of being shot by a nutcase" who might have found his whereabouts from the "Elon Musk's Jet" account.
After Musk offered Jack Sweeney $5,000 to take down the account, the young coder jokingly said that he wanted $50,000, which would allow him to buy a Tesla Model 3, amongst other things. Later, Sweeney reportedly asked about getting an internship at Tesla in return for deleting the account.
How does the account track Elon Musk's private jet, and what is the CEO's opinion about it?
The DMs reportedly revealed that the CEO was surprised over how Sweeney accessed the data from Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS–B). Upon learning the data source, Musk deemed air traffic control as "primitive."
Jack Sweeney operates 15 such accounts to track flights of several tech billionaires. The account tracking Elon Musk's jet is by far the most popular, with over 110,000 followers. According to the profile, the bot compiles data from the ADS-B database and tracks Musk's 2015 Gulfstream G650 airplane.
The aircraft is listed in FAA's Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed (LADD), which hides Musk's details from the ownership of the flight. However, the flight can still be tracked by an ADS-B flight scanner platform like ADSBexchange.
According to Jack Sweeney's website:
"The bot takes action on landing and take off and states the location, state, country, and city. Also creates an image of a map of that location and attaches to the tweet. Also calculates and estimated flight time from takeoff to landing and puts the flight time in the landing tweet."
What is known about 19-year-old Jack Sweeney?
Jack Sweeney is a freshman at the University of Central Florida, where he is pursuing a degree in Aerospace Engineering. As per his LinkedIn, the Florida native is set to graduate in 2025. Previously, he attended Lake-Sumter State College in a dual enrollment program, whilst he also attended South Lake High School.
The 19-year-old UCF student is a self-proclaimed Tesla enthusiast and is adept in programming languages like Python, C, Java, JS, and PHP. Last year, he was associated with Lunargistics as data analyst intern and currently works at UberJets as a part-time Application Developer.
