Elon Musk shuts down Twitter negotiations with teen creator of flight-tracking bot

Elon Musk slipped into the DMs of the creator of the Twitter bot @ElonJet last month.

That was the start of a drawn-out conversation between Jack Sweeney, 19, a college freshman at the University of Central Florida, and Tesla CEO billionaire Musk.

Musk started the conversation by asking a small favor: Would Sweeney take down the bot that posted his private plane’s whereabouts? And, to sweeten the deal: What if he threw in $5,000?

@ElonJet tracks the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet. Sweeney, a flight tracking whiz who utilizes publicly available data that comes from the Federal Aviation Administration, has set up 15 other jet trackers for SpaceX planes, celebrity-toting jets, and aircraft from other big names like Jeff Bezos. @ElonJet was the most popular tracking bot in Sweeney’s collection, but it only had about 83,000 followers at the time this all started. Now it’s up to over 241,000.