A college freshman who has been tracking Elon Musk’s private jet has been offered $5,000 by the billionaire to take down his feed. Publishing results on his @ElonJet Twitter account, 19-year-old Jack Sweeney has built up a following of almost 130,000. But the flight tracking wizard has not accepted the offer, countering with a suggestion to either add a zero or offer him an internship.

Elon’s Jet

Like most of the super-rich, Elon Musk doesn’t fly commercial. The South African-born entrepreneur, worth an estimated $276 billion, is the owner of a Gulfstream G650 ER private jet. Registered N628TS, it was delivered to Musk in 2016 and has been his runabout for the past five years.

Like most private jet owners, Musk’s Gulfstream is blocked from all the popular flight tracking websites. But that doesn’t mean it’s invisible. Requests to block aircraft to flight tracking websites mean tail numbers are not visible to their users, but with ADS-B and some smart IT skills, any aircraft can be tracked in almost any part of the world.

That, it appears, is a problem for Mr Musk. Avid space and aviation fan Jack Sweeney has written a program that notifies about Elon’s jet, and has set up a Twitter account publicizing its movements called @ElonJet. Understandably, Elon is not entirely comfortable with the whole world knowing his movements, and has reportedly offered the 19-year-old thousands of dollars to take the site down.

A security risk

Reporting by Protocol recalls how, last autumn, Jack Sweeney received a rather unexpected direct message (DM) on Twitter. The sender was none other than Elon Musk himself, who asked the freshman simply,

“Can you take this down? It is a security risk.”

Having sent the message after midnight Sweeney’s time, Musk had to wait almost seven hours for a reply. When one did come, Sweeney was clearly unperturbed by having contact with the world’s richest man. He responded jovially,

“Yes I can but it’ll cost you a Model 3 only joking unless?”

In the ensuing conversation, Elon asked Jack how much he made out of his Twitter bots, to which Jack said it was no more than about $20 each month. Musk then reportedly offered him $5,000 to close the account down, saying that,

"I don't love the idea of being shot by a nutcase."

Standing his ground, Jack Sweeney countered by telling Musk to stick another zero on that number, noting that $50K would “be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a Model 3.” So far, Musk has not paid any money to the student, and the account remains active.

Elon’s jet is not the only private plane that Sweeney has developed bots to track. Indeed, he also tracks the private jets of the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, and has around 15 flight tracking accounts in all. But it seems that the popularity of the @ElonJet account was what shook the billionaire. At the time he made the offer, the account had 80,000 followers. With the more recent publicity around the conversation between the two, it now has 127K followers, and keeps going up!

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Unblocking the blocked

For most regular avgeeks, blocked tail numbers are pretty hard to track. But for a smart kid like Sweeney, it was a case of solving a puzzle with several missing pieces. ADS-B transponders show the exact location of a plane in real-time and are charted on the ADSB-Exchange. Parsing this information via a bot allows Sweeney to logic out where the plane is going to and from.

ADS-B allows aircraft to be tracked, even on blocked tail numbers. Image: ADSB Exchange

It is a bit of a loophole in what’s supposed to be a relatively secure environment, and one which requires a lot of industry knowledge to be able to manipulate. For Sweeney, his father worked in aviation, and he has himself been tracking aircraft since he was young.

The most recent communication between Sweeney and Musk was sent last week, when Sweeney said that, in fact, he would prefer an internship to any sort of financial payment. Elon hasn’t opened the message yet, but Sweeney thinks he knows why…

“I think he’s on vacay in Hawaii if you check ElonJet.”