A Twitter feud has broken out between the world’s richest man and a 19-year-old Florida teen.
Jack Sweeney created a Twitter bot, @ElonJet, which tracks Elon Musk’s private jet and tweets out when and where the plane takes off or lands and the duration of each trip, per CNN.
- “Can you take this down? It is a security risk,” Musk said to Jack Sweeney over Twitter DMs.
- Sweeney replied seven hours later: “Yes I can but it’ll cost you a Model 3 only joking unless?”
Took off from Hawthorne, California, US. pic.twitter.com/nH7RWF7S3G
— Elon Musk's Jet (@ElonJet) January 30, 2022
- The college freshman has developed 15 other such bots that track the travels of high-profile tech giants like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. But Musk’s was most popular, with nearly 83,000 followers, making it a safety concern, per Protocol.
- In the Twitter exchange, Musk asked how much Sweeney made off the Twitter accounts, to which Sweeney said no more than $20. Elon took this as an opportunity to offer $5,000 to delete the account.
- “Any chance to up that to $50k? It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a Model 3.”
Musk is currently thinking about it and hasn’t paid Sweeney a dime, saying it “doesn’t feel right to pay to shut this down.”
So, Sweeney went public with the information and provided Insider with screenshots of the private exchange.
But he did offer Musk some advice on getting a blocking program to counter flight tracking, though Sweeney can still track him, per CNN. “It’s just a bit more complicated,” he said.