Billionaire Elon Musk offered a college student a handsome sum for taking down a Twitter account tracking the movement of his private jet. The 19-year-old teen, Jack Sweeney, denied the money and asked for an internship instead.
A University of Central Florida student, Jack Sweeney was offered $5,000 to delete the Twitter bot @ElonJet by Elon Musk. Sweeney received a Twitter DM from Musk last Fall, as reported by Protocol. "Can you take this down? It is a security risk," the message read. Tesla CEO, however, admitted it felt wrong to pay him to delete the account.
Sweeney told the DailyMail on Wednesday that he would like an opportunity for an internship with the SpaceX CEO instead of the money he is offering. He is yet to hear back on the said proposal from Musk.
Sweeny has created 15 Twitter bots tracking the private planes of tech billionaires
Sweeney designed the Twitter Twitter flight tracking bot @ElonJet, which aims to track the whereabouts of Elon Musk's jets. An information technology student, Sweeney has created 15 Twitter bots tracking the private planes of tech billionaires including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. The account Elon Musk's private plane boasts of the most fooling so far with more than 114K followers.
Sweeney's complex program works on data from multiple public sources to track flight plans that are otherwise not easily available to the public and requires a profound knowledge of the aviation system.
Sweeny asked for an internship
Musk was impressed with the framework behind Sweeney's program and surprised at how all the information on air traffic was available to the public. Musk asked the teen how much does he make from the accounts, which the teen said was around $20 a month. The Tesla CEO then offered him $5,000 to take down the account.
"Any chance to up that to $50k? It would be a great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a Model 3," Sweeney responded. Musk said he would think about it. However, in the latest conversation between the two last Wednesday, Sweeney told Musk he'd prefer an internship over money in exchange for deleting the account.
Sweeney hasn't heard back from Musk on his offer as of yet.
