19-year-old student Jack Sweeney.
Photo Twitter @JxckSweeney
Jack Sweeney is a 19-year-old college student who has put Elon Musk in check with a Twitter account where he posts all the movements of the Tesla owner's private jet. The person affected has offered him $5,000 to close the profile. Too low an offer to give up on such a successful project.
The tech-savvy teen launched the @ElonJet profile in June 2020. He did so after inventing a computer program – one of the popular bots – to collect publicly available air traffic data to track the private plane of Musk and other executives such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
But it has been the account of the millionaire creator of SpaceX that has managed to accumulate almost 300,000 followers. Almost daily, the $70 million Gulfstream G650ER flies between Musk's home in California and the company's various headquarters in the Texas cities of Austin, Houston and Brownsville, where it moved the business in December 2021.
The precision of the movements, with minute details of takeoffs and landings, has become "a security problem", as the millionaire has denounced on his Twitter account. Although Sweeney warns that his program does not detect the people who travel on the ship, it is not difficult to guess where Musk may be.
On January 23 and 24, the executive spent two days in Hawaii. If you compare ElonJet data with celebrity tracking accounts, such as the popular Deuxmoi with 1.3 million followers, you can see that Musk was seen those days at the Four Seasons hotel on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, where he lives. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle and independent director of Tesla.
A very low offer
The situation has become so desperate for Musk that he has decided to personally intervene. Last week he slipped into Sweeney's direct messages to offer him $5,000 (4,420 euros) in exchange for closing the account to avoid security risks. It was not enough.
The student from the University of Central Florida (UCF) made him a counteroffer of $50,000, which, according to him, would go to pay for his studies or to buy a Tesla Model 3. Musk replied that he would think about it and then tell him no. it felt good to pay for the closure.
"The offer is not enough to pay for the fun I get from this and all the work I've put into it," the teenager said in an interview with Insider, the medium to which he leaked the messages. In recent days, the executive seems to have implemented some of Sweeney's advice and has applied a blocking system that changes the identifier of the plane to make it more difficult to track. "I just have to fix it," the young man boasted.
The companies raffle it
Sweeney's public exposure has angered Musk, who ended up blocking his personal Twitter account, at the same time that the profile of the plane added 200,000 followers in several days. At the moment, the teenager is winning the pulse.
His technological prowess has caught the attention of industry professionals who believe his system could help them predict flight times more accurately. The company Stratos Jet Charters, based in Orlando (Florida), has just offered him a job within its technology team that the young man is still hesitating to accept.
"I'm not sure," he told the New York Post, saying he prefers to focus on his studies and continue his part-time job as a developer for UberJets. Stratos competes in the sector with Wheels Up, NetJets and other jet services, business booming around the world due to the pandemic.
The young man seems to be more interested in continuing to make money on his spy account. He has just opened a new Twitter account named @ElonJetBSC, where he reports that he is creating a cryptocurrency within the Binance-owned virtual money trader Binance Chain, based on the movements of Musk's private planes around the world. As of February 2, 2022, the profile had 520 followers.
