Last week, it was reported that 19-year old Jack Sweeney had created a Twitter bot back in 2021 which had the ability to track the movements of the private jets belonging to several tech billionaires. This included none other than Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk to the point where Musk reached out to the teen asking him to stop.
Musk told Sweeney that this posed a security risk to him and offered him $5,000 to delete the account. However, Sweeney countered and said that he would do it for $50,000 where he said that the money would help him with things like college tuition and maybe even help him buy a car like the Tesla Model 3.
The CEO then told Sweeney he would think about it but hasn’t gotten back to him yet, which is why Sweeney decided to take his conversation with Musk public. Speaking to Business Insider, Sweeney said, “He went the opposite way of me, so why wouldn’t I go the opposite way of him?”
To Sweeney’s credit, he did give Musk some advice on how to block being tracked by using a system that would change his jet’s identifier. According to Sweeney, he said that it appears Musk did heed his advice, but he now sees it as a new challenge where he said that he will now have to “work around it”.
We can understand why Musk might not be too keen on paying Sweeney $50,000 to stop. If Sweeney was able to track Musk’s jet’s movements, who’s to say that someone else won’t come up with something similar and demand another $50,000, or more, from Musk again? We’re not sure if Sweeney will ever take down his bot, but in the meantime, his work has managed to land him a job at a company called UberJets where he helped develop a platform that tracks chartered flights to help find cheaper seats.
Filed in . Read more about Privacy and Tesla. Source: businessinsider
