It’s been a year and a half now since 19-year-old Jack Sweeney created a Twitter account that tracks every trip Elon Musk makes on his private jet. People who subscribe to it therefore know in real time where the richest man in the world takes off and where he lands.
If the student of information and communication technologies has done the same with other personalities, such as the founder of Microsoft Bill Gates or that of Amazon Jeff Bezos, it is indeed the movements of Elon Musk that are generating the most interest. As of this writing, the account is followed by 116,000 people.
Alerted to this, the boss of SpaceX and Tesla would have ended up contacting the young man via Twitter. According to exchanges published by multiple media, the businessman would have expressed his concern to the student from the University of Florida. “I don’t like the idea of being shot by a weirdo”, he confided to him, after asking him to delete the account.
Unfortunately for him, his request went unheeded. Elon Musk therefore recently contacted the student again to offer him 5,000 dollars against the deletion of the account. To which the young man replied that he would prefer a Tesla or, better, an internship in one of the businessman’s companies.
Ethically questionable, but not illegal
If the publication of these data is ethically questionable, they were in any case not obtained illegally. It was the young man’s good knowledge of the aeronautical sector that enabled him to cross-reference various public data such as transponder data and anonymous flight plans. Even though Elon Musk’s private jet is blacklisted, meaning its flight plans aren’t public, so it’s well and truly visible to those in the know. When the student explained the operation of his program to Elon Musk, the latter would have simply deplored a “primitive air traffic control”.
Since then, however, Elon Musk has begun to thwart the student’s program. On several occasions, the movements shown on Jack Sweeney’s Twitter account have been different from where the business executive actually was. His plane, for example, indicated a landing in progress in Austin (Texas) when he was at that time in the middle of a conference with thousands of listeners from all over the world.
“I can follow the plane, not know who is on board”, commented the student. Asked by the Daily Mail, the spokesperson for Elon Musk did not wish to react.
Now that Elon Musk has figured out how to play with the program, the student’s chances of doing an internship at Tesla have probably diminished as well…