19-year-old monitoring Musk's jet now 'tracking Gates, Bezos': Report

San Francisco, Feb 3

The 19-year-old teenager demanding Tesla CEO Elon Musk hand over $50,000 to stop him tweeting the location of Musk’s private jet has reportedly said he is creating dozens more accounts tracking the movements of other rich and famous people.

Jack Sweeney, an aviation enthusiast, said he had created 16 automated Twitter accounts, or bots, similar to @ElonJet to follow jets owned by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (@GatesJet), Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban and the rapper Drake, the Guardian reported.

In an interview with the Guardian, Sweeney said he had also created a website, Ground Control, to “monetise” the service by offering bespoke tracking services to celebrities’ superfans and to host web versions of the Twitter bots if the micro-blogging site closes his accounts because of privacy concerns raised by the subjects.

“They are either really prominent people or just like really interesting,” Sweeney was quoted as saying. “Lately I have been adding people that [his followers] have requested,” he added.

Recent accounts he has set up after requests include Cuban and Drake, who he said was the most interesting.

“He has the biggest plane out of all of them, it is a giant Boeing,” Sweeney said.

The rapper’s plane, Air Drake, is a $185m 59ft-long Boeing 767-200ER that can carry 216 passengers.

Sweeney, who created @ElonJet in June 2020, said he hoped Musk would reopen negotiations to buy and close down the account. The co-founder and chief executive of Tesla has refused the teenager’s demand for $50,000.

Recently, media reports said that Musk has blocked Sweeney on Twitter. While Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to delete the bot, Sweeney asked for $50,000.

However, Musk declined to pay and has blocked Sweeney on the micro-blogging site.

The billionaire reached out to the 19-year-old last November to express concern about the bot. IANS