Elon Musk Offered Teenager $5,000 to Stop Tracking His Private Jet
Enterprising 19-year-old Jack Sweeney created a bot that tracks the location of Elon Musk's private jet and the billionaire is, or at least was, willing to pay to get him to stop.
As Protocol reports, Sweeney revealed that his popular @ElonJet Twitter account, which posts updates from his bot about the jet's location, isn't liked by Elon Musk. In fact, Musk made contact with Sweeney via Direct Message on Twitter last fall, stating it was a security risk and, "I don’t love the idea of being shot by a nutcase." Musk then proceeded to offer Sweeney $5,000 to delete the account.
Sweeney countered the offer by asking, "Any chance to up that to $50k? It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a Model 3." All Musk would say was he'd think about it, but since then nothing has been heard and therefore the jet-tracking bot remains active.
The ElonJet account has over 208,000 followers, which is likely to increase significantly with news spreading of Musk trying to get it deleted. Sweeney says creating the bot has aided him in a number of ways, including helping him learn to code and gaining a part-time job working for UberJets as a developer.
The bot isn't doing anything illegal. The data it relies on is shared by the FAA, and the LADD block list Musk's jet is on doesn't stop Sweeney keeping an eye on the ADS-B transponder present on his jet, which is tracked by the ADS-B Exchange. A simple cross-reference handled by the bot turns anonymous FAA flight plans into a public destination for a specific plane. It works so well, Sweeney rewrote his bot to track multiple planes including those used by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
Sign up for What's New Now to get our top stories delivered to
Read more on pcmag.com
