When you are in the public eye as often as someone like Elon Musk, you will not always like things that people pay attention. Musk found himself in that situation this week, because he competed with Twitter bot that tracked his flight. Every time the Musk took off from a place and landed in a new location, that Twitter Bot reported it, and now it seems that Musk is willing to pay to silence the bot forever.
CTHE The Twitter account in question is @elonjet, and since making an account in June 2020, has shared many details – if not all – Elon Musk flights. A 19-year-old child with the name Jack Sweeney is the person behind the account, and he creates a total of 15 Twitter bots that track and post celebrity flight data.
According to the protocol, Sweeney was contacted by Musk in 2021, with the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla which offered to pay $ 5,000 to reduce Twitter bot. Sweeney, even though he was, it seemed to understand when he held all the cards and reportedly asked Musk to raise his offer. “Is there a chance to reach $ 50k?” Sweeney asked DM Twitter with Musk. “It will be a big support in college and maybe it will allow me to get a car even maybe model 3.”
Until now, both have not been able to attack the agreement, so Elonjet remains active for now. The post history recently suggested that Musk returned to Austin, Texas, after a short vacation in Hawaii, but of course, the data that Twitter bot shares only showed the location of the plane in question, not the one who drives it.
Obviously why the Musk might not want something like the flight data easily accessible by the public – when he put it in his DM with Sweeney, “I don’t like the idea of being shot by crazy people” – but the data of Sweeney is using for the Twitter bot is not exactly personal.
As a protocol report explained, tracing the Musk when he was in the air was not as easy as looking for FAA data because of any information that would identify Musk flights specifically kept secret. Sweeney Bots instead rely on information from the ADS-B Exchange (which publishes data from most aircraft with ADS-B transponders), along with the planned flight of FAA and data from the airport to find Musk flights.
So, while Sweeney’s bot does need to do some heavy removal in the form of cross references to this data to find out when Musk traveled, they use publicly accessible information. Although it may need some know-how in terms of identifying certain fields, there seems to be someone who wants to do some excavations to find details of celebrity flights, even when celebrities have requested that the FAA limit flight data that can be publicly accessible publicly accessible.