Jack Sweeney, an information and communications technology student, recently rose to fame for creating a Twitter account that tracks the private jet of Elon Musk and other personalities. A few months ago, the founder of SpaceX even offered him $5,000 to have it removed, which the student refused to do after attempting an ambitious counter-offer. Since then, Elon Musk has decided to buy Twitter. What will happen to @ElonJet, the Twitter account that followed him?
“It’s hard to believe he’s not going to do anything against my account,” Jack Sweeney told Insider.
In the past, Elon Musk had indeed complained to the young man about the invasion of his privacy. ” I don’t like the idea of being shot by a crackpot,” he had confessed to her. What the student from the University of Florida had replied by saying that he used public data accessible to all. Indeed, Jack Sweeney did nothing illegal to obtain this information, he simply used his good knowledge in the aeronautical field to mix several databases accessible online and code a powerful bot. This way, every time Elon Musk’s jet takes off or lands somewhere, a tweet is automatically posted to his account.
“If he closed my account, people would call”
“In a recent statement, Elon Musk said he would remove harmful spam and bots from Twitter. Was he talking about mine?” the student wondered in a recent tweet. Hard to say since the businessman had also promised that his detractors could stay on the social network.
In the past, Elon Musk had tried to have this account closed, offering the young man $ 5,000. This one had raised the stakes to $50,000 or an internship at Tesla. The businessman had then no longer answered and was content to use a jammer to make it more complicated to follow his movements. On several occasions, he had also played the youngster by appearing at a place when ElonJet had just tweeted that his plane had landed thousands of miles away. But Jack Sweeney had still managed to follow him.
“I have a plan B”
The 20-year-old wants to be confident. Given his 430,000 subscribers, he is convinced that Elon Musk could not delete his account with impunity. “He always talks about free speech, so if he did something and shut down (it) people would call him,” he told TechXplore.
In case his account is still deleted for invasion of privacy, the student has already planned a plan B. “I will put the info on my Discord server or on Telegram,” he said.
However, he hopes it won’t have to come to that. “Who knows maybe he will contact me again to negotiate and that he will offer me a job at Twitter”, he concluded.