[imagesource: Reuters]

A teen and his bot seem to have gotten under the skin of the world’s richest person for a moment.

Jack Sweeney, a 19-year-old student and aviation enthusiast from Florida, created the Twitter bot @ElonJet, which tracks and posts real-time updates of Musk’s private jet location.

The bot uses publicly available data from the Federal Aviation Administration to track the jet.

Basically, he can assume most of where Musk and his fam go.

The Telsa and SpaceX co-founder saw the Twitter account and couldn’t help but slide into the DMs of the aspiring techy to try and put a stop to it.

But Sweeney was not going to take it down without getting something for all his hard work:

Landed near Harlingen, Texas, US. Apx. flt. time 2 Hours : 16 Mins. pic.twitter.com/VKmkxfWyh7

— Elon Musk’s Jet (@ElonJet) January 31, 2022

The Guardian has the private negotiations:

 “Can you take this down? It is a security risk,” Musk, who has amassed an estimated $220bn fortune, wrote in a direct message to the teenager. “I don’t love the idea of being shot by a nutcase.”

After a series of messages, which Sweeney has made public, Musk offered Sweeney a deal: “How about $5k for this account and generally helping make it harder for crazy people to track me?”

Sweeney attempted to negotiate. “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 [Tesla] Model 3.”

Musk decided to think about it, saying, it “doesn’t feel right to pay to shut this down”.

The flight-tracking whiz has set up 15 other jet trackers for SpaceX planes, celebrity-toting jets, and aircraft from other big names like Jeff Bezos:

Check out the other planes including the second SpaceX Jet! https://t.co/B7S3oE6D2j

— Elon Musk’s Jet (@ElonJet) September 26, 2020

That wasn’t the end of the negotiation for Sweeney, who said: “I’ve done a lot of work on this and 5k is not enough… ”

He posted the whole conversation on Twitter to prompt Musk to respond, to no avail. He then followed up some days later and asked for an internship at one of Musk’s companies, to no avail.

Mashable reports that Sweeney was then blocked by the billionaire:

Musk went a step further after Protocol’s initial report about the take-down drama published last week, enabling a second data-blocking method that acts as another layer of privacy but still isn’t impenetrable.

These blocks would deter the average person from tracking this particular plane. But Sweeney’s father is in the airline industry, as Protocol reported, and the college student knew where to find less-accessible databases.

He figured out how to continue accessing the publicly available (but now much more buried) flight info that he could plug into the bot.

Sweeney hasn’t given up yet, upping the antics by announcing, “Elon got PIA but I’ve already identified it!”

PIA refers to the Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program, which allows operators to use alternate, temporary International Civil Aviation Organisation aircraft addresses that aren’t tied to an operator in the Civil Aviation Registry:

It is extortion. I hope he does not get it. I am glad Elon Musk didn’t let this kid extort 50k.

— Jo Tucker Kendrick (@DidUhearlatest) January 31, 2022

The radio silence on Musk’s end seems to suggest that he doesn’t feel particularly threatened by Sweeney and his bot after all.

It did also take him one and half years to contact Sweeney, during which time the jet-tracking bot ran without any complaints.

[sources:guardian&mashable]