Musk reportedly offered $5k to college student for taking down his jet tracker on Twitter - Report
Sputnik news agency and radio 28.1.2022
The teenager has set up 15 flight-tracking accounts, each of which is controlled by bots designed to read data and tweet whenever a specific plane takes off or lands. Each one follows a high-profile figure, practically all of them are in the tech industry, such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
The world's richest man Elon Musk messaged the owner of a Twitter account that tracks his private jet, offering $5,000 if he took the account down, tech news site Protocol reported on Wednesday.
The "Elon Musk's Jet" account depicts the movements of Musk's private jet, using bots that monitor publicly available air-traffic data. As of Thursday, it has roughly 110,000 followers, making Musk's tracker the most popular of all the trackers created by the 19-year-old.
According to the report, the account's owner Jack Sweeney, got a message from Musk in the fall of last year at 12:13 am.
It read: "Can you take this down? It is a security risk."
Sweeney is said to have taken his time responding to one of the most popular Twitter bloggers of the era, and after some seven hours allegedly said: "Yes I can but it'll cost you a Model 3 only joking unless?"
To that, Musk replied that he did not "love the idea of being shot by a nutcase."
Then, after exchanging a few messages, Musk reportedly offered Sweeney $5,000. "Any chance to up that to $50k? It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a Model 3," Sweeney responded per the report.
Musk said he would think about it, but has not responded, according to the outlet.
According to the report, the college student then answered Musk's question about where he got the data, to which the Tesla and SpaceX CEO replied: "Air traffic control is so primitive."
Musk recently stated that social media accounts that track his whereabouts are "becoming a security issue."
According to the Protocol's report, when accessible, such bots use FAA data, which keeps track of when and where flights depart and land, as well as their intended course. Musk's plane, along with many others, is on the LADD block list, which removes identifying records from the data.
But the outlet noted that even restricted flights are not entirely private. The data from most aircraft's ADS-B transponders, which display a plane's location in the air in real-time, can be used since it is charted on the ADS-B Exchange.
