Jack Sweeney became a talked-about name when reports surfaced of an interesting conversation between him and Elon Musk.
The discussion stemmed from Sweeney, a 19-year old, creating a Twitter bot to track Elon Musk’s private jet as it travels across the world. Let’s just say Musk didn’t care for it.
The account, @ElonJet, has over 300,000 followers. It is run by bots and is programmed to tweet every time a selected plane takes off or lands. It was created in June 2020 and is still active. It’s not just Musk’s flights Sweeney tracks; he also has accounts for Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.
Sweeney’s escapades have earned him recognition beyond Musk. In addition to learning how to code and scoring social media followers, Sweeney landed a part-time job at aviation consultant UberJets as an application developer.
The New York Post reports Sweeney also earned another job offer to be on the tech development team for Orlando private charter flight firm Stratos Jet Charters.
However, Sweeney said he is not sure if he will accept, and cited other obligations such as schoolwork and duties with UberJets, where he builds a platform to track chartered flights to assist clients in finding cheaper seats.
According to tech news site Protocol, Musk reached out via a Twitter DM to the University of Central Florida freshman in December about the account and asked, “Can you take this down? It is a security risk.”
Sweeney played it cool and didn’t respond for seven hours. Then, following a brief exchange, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX offered Sweeney $5,000 to delete the account. Sweeney’s response: he asked the billionaire to add another zero. Most recently, Sweeney said he would accept an internship in lieu of payment.
No payment or internship offer has been made, and Musk has blocked Sweeney on social media accounts.
