Elon Musk Offered Teen $5,000 To Stop Tracking His Private Jet And Sharing It On Twitter

Among the reasons why private jets are called "private" is because they allows their users to fly exclusively in private, and not being among the public.

This is why flying and owning a private jet can only be enjoyed by a limited few, due to its high price.

And among the few people who could afford this method of transportation, is Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk.

The richest person on Earth has been known to fly in private using his 2015 Gulfstream G650ER jet.

But not too private, because since June 2020, the Twitter handle @ElonJet has been tracking Musk’s jet with a bot using public data from the Federal Aviation Administration. The Twitter bot then provides updates on the location of the jet through tweets, based on that feed.

And Musk isn't liking it.

After realizing that the Twitter bot has amassed huge amount of followers, Musk sent the operator of the bot, Jack Sweeney, a University of Central Florida freshman, a direct message on Twitter.

Musk expressed his concern about being tracked due to security risks it poses.

"I don’t love the idea of being shot by a nutcase," Musk reportedly said, suggesting that social media accounts discussing his whereabouts were "becoming a security issue."

Musk asked the bot owner to take the account down, and even offered him $5,000.

"How about $5k for this account and generally helping make it harder for crazy people to track me?" Musk asked.

"It was just crazy, the whole thing. I couldn’t believe it," said Sweeney.

But Sweeney said no.

"I’d put in so much work and time, and it’s something I enjoy doing and 5K doesn’t seem like a lot for how much I get out of it and I enjoy doing it," Sweeney said.

After all, what he did is legal.

Sweeney who love planes, used legal websites that track plane transponders. He combined the information he gathered from the publicly available air traffic data with his own programming skills to create the Twitter bot.

He said that he had been working on the technology behind the account months before he launched it as a COVID-19 lockdown project.

He did ask Musk to up the offer to $50,000. He also asked for an internship.

"Sounds doable, account and all my help. Any chance to up that to $50K?" he asked Musk.

"Never intended for it to create a security concern," Sweeney said in their private conversation.

After all, Sweeney said that he was a fan of Musk.

"I knew he had the jet, and I just knew it would reveal what business is going on and where he is going and stuff," he said.

"I put a good amount of time into development and now make income from it that helps in college."

What's more, Sweeney thinks that he did nothing wrong.

What he did was only to "track the plane not who may or may not be on board," said Sweeney.

Musk reportedly turned down Sweeney's offer, saying that it didn't feel right "to pay to shut this down," and ended the conversation.

But right before that, Musk asked Sweeney for help to update his security system.

Regardless, Sweeney said he can still track Musk's private jet despite some privacy measures that have been taken.

"I just have to work around it," Sweeney said.

Sweeney said that he had decided to go public with Musk's offer because the billionaire had lost interest in a deal.

"He went the opposite way of me, so why wouldn't I go the opposite way of him?" he said.

Besides tracking Elon Musk's private jet, the college freshman has also developed about a dozen other flight bot accounts to track the travels of other high-profile tech titans, including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, as well as a number of popular celebrities.