Elon Musk offers a teenager $5k to stop tracking his private jet
Done with a python BOT — Published on Twitter
Who is he
Jack Sweeney, 19, is a college freshman at the University of Central Florida. He created a python bot that tracks Elon Musk’s jet and publishes its location in real-time on Twitter.
How did he do it
Sweeney created a bot that uses open-source data from the ads-b exchange the largest database of unfiltered flight data. If you’re a developer you know that this is an easy task especially knowing that ads-b exchange offers a comprehensive and free API.
The real threat is that Elon musk’s jet location is shared in real-time on Twitter. @Elonjet is the name of the account. It simply blew up in the last few days as it reached 300k followers in a matter of days.
What exactly happened with Elon Musk
The richest person on earth sent a private message to Sweeney offering 5000 dollars to take down the Twitter account. Sweeney refused and eventually counteroffered with $50 000 dollars and an internship at Tesla.
Elon never responded. Then he blocked the young college student.
How Elon Musk is dealing with it now
What you need to know is that Elon Musk has several jets, two registered under SpaceX, one under the control of his brother, and last be not least the one tracked by Sweeney. We can’t really predict if it is Elon or a SpaceX executive on board, but I have to say that this project is a nice addition to Sweeney’s coding portfolio.
Elon may have gotten special authorizations in the last few days as his jet is now using a military communication channel which makes it harder for Sweeney’s bot to track the jet’s live location.
What’s next
The teenager is now working on adding many more celebrities, he started with Kanye West and the likes of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
Sweeney says that he can get some money out of his project but doesn’t know yet how he will do it.
Side note: I believe that someone should make a mobile app to pin someone’s jet and get live updates on mobile. This is a cool project idea. So feel free to build & deploy it yourself.
Personal opinion
I like it.
Most people will say that this is dangerous for these celebrities, but all the data used is public and available. So Sweeney’s bot isn’t a real treat, any plane can be tracked and that’s normal in the aviation industry. In fact, if a plane goes offline and becomes untrackable is considered missing and emergency procedures will be triggered.
This is a genuine coding project that has probably opened many doors for the young teenager.
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