A teenager asked Tesla Founder and CEO Elon Musk to pay him $50,000 to end Twitter bot tracking of his private jet.
A 19-year-old teenager named Jack Sweeney reportedly created a Twitter bot account called @ElonJet that keeps up with Musk’s private jet in real-time. According to an article from Protocol, the multi-billionaire hit up the teen sometime toward the end of last year, asking Sweeney to stop the tracking of his jet because it poses risks to his security, metro.co.uk reports.
“Can you take this down? It is a security risk,” Musk questioned in the teen’s DMs. Sweeney created the account back in June 2020, and it now has more than 198,600 followers. The teen keeps up with Musk’s jet by using publicly available data and automatic posts that go up every time Musk’s jet takes flight and lands at a destination.
When Musk offered the teen $5,000 to stop tracking him, Sweeney hit him back, asking for $50,000. He mentioned that he’d like to use the money to financially support his college education and help him “possibly” get a car, “maybe even a [Tesla] Model 3.”
During the request turned business negotiation, Sweeney advised Musk to make it harder for others to track his jet and even asked if he could be given an internship instead of being paid. By the end of it, Musk told the teen he’d need time to consider his requests, mentioning that he didn’t feel comfortable with paying to have the account “shut down.”
