It’s been another surreal month for the freshman college student who made an enemy of Elon Musk last year by publicly tracking his private jet on Twitter. Following news that Musk has struck a deal to buy the social media company for $44 billion, 19-year-old Jack Sweeney can’t help but feel partially responsible.
“I think I did have some impact,” he said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “He might have just gotten a little bit mad” about the posts.
Sweeney created his plane-tracking account, ElonJet, in 2020; it automatically tweets out the location of the private aircraft using open-source aviation data.
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In November 2021, Musk sent Sweeney a direct message asking him to cut it out. “He offered me $5,000 to take it down and help him make it slightly harder for ‘crazy people to track me,’” the young computer whiz told The New York Times in February.
Sweeney replied with an offer more befitting the world’s richest man: $50,000. But Musk didn’t take the deal, nor a separate offer to remove the account in exchange for an internship.
The pair stopped communicating on Jan. 23, the Times noted. Just days later, according to public filings, Musk began amassing his stake in Twitter. Sweeney can only speculate about whether his interactions helped motivate the investment.
Ironically, Musk has said that his decision to buy Twitter was spurred by its failure to uphold principles of free speech. Yet he has blocked Sweeney on the platform and previously blocked the ElonJet account, too, the teenager said.
The billionaire unblocked the jet-tracking account “the other week,” according to Sweeney, who thinks Musk may have done so “to make it less of a story” and pre-empt questions about the apparent hypocrisy.
Despite the bad blood, Sweeney thinks Musk “could be good” as Twitter’s new owner by addressing excessive spam and making the platform more “transparent if users are taken off.”
He does worry that Musk will ban his account upon completion of the takeover later this year. If that happens, Sweeney said he’ll just go to another platform, and he notes that would create bad press for Musk.
It remains to be seen whether Musk will be able to successfully complete the Twitter transaction. Tesla’s stock has slumped in recent days, eliminating $100 billion of its market value and raising doubts about whether the carmaker’s shareholders want Musk distracted by yet another project.
Sweeney has other thoughts on his mind, like finishing three more years of school before hopefully finding a job that blends his passions for software and aerospace. Plus, following the success of ElonJet, he started tracking other billionaires, including Russian oligarchs.
“It’s pretty crazy. I never expected like two years ago for the account to get this far,” he said.
