A 19-year-old developed a flight-tracking program on Twitter, and Elon Musk tried to get him to stop.
Last fall, Musk sent a Twitter message to the owner of the ElonJet account, which tracks the movements of his planes, saying: “Can you remove this? It’s a security risk.”
To Musk’s surprise, the account holder was a 19-year-old student, Jack Sweeney.
Sweeney jokingly replied to Musk’s message earlier in the day, “Yes, I can, but the Model 3 will only cost you joking unless?”
ElonJet is one of 15 flight-tracking accounts set up by Sweeney, operated by bots programmed to analyze data and tweet every time a selected plane takes off or lands. Each one tracks a high-profile figure, almost all in the tech field, including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. But Musk’s tracker account is the most popular, with nearly 83,000 followers.
It seems that the topic aroused the fear and curiosity of Mask, saying that he did not like anyone to track him down, to ask the student to buy the application for $ 5 thousand, but Sweeney asked him to add another zero to bring the number to 50 thousand, so that he could buy a car of the 3rd model.
Musk replied that he would think about it, but so far, he hasn’t paid Sweeney a cent, and the account is still working, protocol reports.
Sweeney says he’s okay with exposure to shadows. He has taken great advantage of ElonJet and other accounts, as he has gained followers on social media, learned how to code, and also landed a part-time job at UberJets as an app developer. Even better, he’s a fan of Elon Musk and has dreamed of having a conversation with a man he’s been looking up to for years.
Sweeney uses data from ADS-B transceivers on most planes that show the plane’s position in the skies in real time, as shown in the ADS-B Exchange. This information.