Elon Musk offered a teenager $5,000 to stop tracking his private jet.
Elon Musk offered a teenager $5000 to stop tracking his private jet,Elon Musk isn’t happy about the jet tracker
The SpaceX founder reached out to 19-year-old Jack Sweeney to urge him to shut down his Twitter account ElonJet – which uses a bot to track the billionaire’s plane and records when and where it takes off or lands and the duration of each trip – but the student rejected the offer and asked for $50,000 or an internship instead.
The college freshman – who has several other flight bot accounts, including those tracking the travels of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos – received a direct message from Musk expressing his security concerns.
Musk wrote in November: “Can you take this down? It’s a security risk.
“I don’t love the idea of being shot by a nutcase.”
After a series of messages, the businessman then offered a deal: “How about $5k for this account and generally helping make it harder for crazy people to track me?”
The student attempted to negotiate and said: “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 [Tesla] Model 3.”
Musk promised to think about the offer, but ultimately declined, telling Sweeney: “It doesn’t feel right to pay to shut this down”.
Sweeney decided to go public with their exchanges in a bid to reopen negotiations as Musk has yet to respond to his offer to delete the account in exchange for an internship.
He told Insider: “I’ve done a lot of work on this and 5k is not enough[to make up for] the fun I have in this, working on it.
“He went the opposite way of me, so why wouldn’t I go the opposite way of him?”
But Sweeney had offered some technical advice to musk, telling him about a blocking programme he could use to counter flight trackers.
He noted: “It looks like he took that advice.”
However, he admitted that hasn’t been a problem for his account.
Asked if he is still able to track the jet, he said: “I am. It’s just a bit more complicated.”
