Elon Musk offers $5,000 to teen to stop tracking his private jet location on Twitter
Elon Musk reached out to a 19-year-old last fall over a Twitter direct message to ask him to stop tracking his flights, according to a report by Protocol.
Since June 2020, the Twitter handle @ElonJet has been tracking Elon Musk’s private jet with a bot using public data from the Federal Aviation Administration. @ElonJet will regularly provide updates on the location of the jet, for example saying that it landed in Austin after a six-hour flight.
The account has over 90,000 followers and regularly gets several hundred likes per tweet.
Jack Sweeney, a college freshman at the University of Central Florida, runs the account.
According to screenshots from Sweeney sent to USA TODAY, the first message Musk sent said, “Can you take this down? It is a security risk.”
$1,000,000,000,000? Elon Musk could become the world’s first trillionaire due to SpaceX
Musk is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire due to his successful rocketry business SpaceX and the value it may provide from Starlink satellites. Musk’s personal wealth shot up by $10.6 billion in October 2021 after a secondary share sale by investors that valued SpaceX over $100 billion, according to CNBC.
Michelle Shen is a Money Tech Digital Reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her @michelle_shen10 on Twitter.