Elon Musk offers $5,000 to student for deleting Twitter account monitoring his flights

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has offered $5,000 to a 19-year-old teenager to delete a Twitter account that tracks his private flights. Jack Sweeney has asked for the internship to remove the @ElonJet account instead of money, Protocol reported. Sweeney runs 15 flight-tracking accounts using a bot that he has programmed to parse the data and post it every time a celebrity’s flight leaves or lands at an airport. 

Each account follows a high-profile person including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk flight tracker account is the most popular with nearly 83,000 followers. Musk reached out to the 19-year-old college student, Jack Sweeney last fall through Twitter DM to express concern about the Twitter account he runs called @ElonJet, which provides regular updates on his flights, as per the Protocol news report. Reportedly, Musk asked Sweeney about the money he made through the Twitter accounts. In response, Sweeney revealed that he earned not more than $20 a month. Elon Musk then offered him $5,000 to remove the Twitter account as he does not "love the idea of being shot by a nutcase" and prevent "crazy people" from knowing his movement. 

Sweeney prefers internship over money to delete Twitter account

As per the news report, Sweeney told Musk to add another 0 as it would be a great support for him in college and allow him to purchase a car maybe even a Model 3. The most recent exchange of messages between Musk and Sweeney took place last Wednesday when he said that he would prefer an internship over money in exchange for deleting the account. Sweeney added that Musk has not opened the text as he is currently vacationing in Hawaii as per @ElonJet. His system requires knowledge of the aviation system to know all the data which is available and public. Sweeney has been tracking planes since his childhood days as his father works in the airline industry. After Sweeney explained to Musk how his system works, the billionaire seemed surprised that the information was accessible and stated that "Air traffic control is so primitive."

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