$200 billion and a deep repository of Redditspeak are no match for a 19-year-old in Orlando with a decent knowledge of bot-building and aviation. That’s what Elon Musk found out when he tried, in vain, to get University of Central Florida freshman Jack Sweeney to take down a Twitter bot that tracks the whereabouts of the billionaire’s jet.
Musk first asked the teen behind @ElonJet to delete the account via a Twitter DM in December. Sweeney joked that he would do it if Musk gave him a Tesla Model 3. Musk said he was worried about the “security risk” of people knowing his location.
“I don’t love the idea of being shot by a nutcase,” he said, before offering an insultingly low $5,000 for the account.
“Any chance to up that to $50k?” Sweeney countered. “It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a Model 3.”
Musk fell silent after that initial reaction and news of the interaction caused the relatively popular Twitter bot to take on hordes of new followers. Sweeney runs several plane-tracking Twitter bots for various VIPs and billionaires, but Musk’s tracker is far and away his most popular.
[content-1]During his conversation with Elon, Sweeney explained how he was able to access the publicly available data and explained to Musk how to have some of this public information blocked. The flight-tracking-obsessed teen’s father works in the industry and he built these bots using his knowledge of obscure but available databases. Even though Musk has gone through the motions of blocking the accessible information to @ElonJet, the bot still reliably cranks out his trips. [content-3]
Sweeney did eventually lower his offer to an internship at one of Musk’s companies, but he has not heard back. Sweeney has since been blocked by Musk.
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This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2022.