Elon Musk Offers ‘Stalker’ $5,000 To Stop Tracking His Plane Location, Saying It Is a Security Risk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk attempted to pay a teen thousands of dollars to shut down his Twitter account @ElonJet that monitors the movements of his private jet around the world.

Last fall, the billionaire reached out to the 19-year-old college student Jack Sweeney via Twitter DMs and offered him $5,000 to deactivate the account, Protocol reports.

"Can you take this down? It is a security risk," he wrote to Sweeney, expressing his dislike with the prospect of being shot by a "nutcase."

The teen nearly seven hours later responded: "but it'll cost you a Model 3 only joking unless?"

Musk asked the teen how much money he made from the Twitter accounts, to which he stated it was no more than $20 per month. Elon then made his own offer: $5,000 to shut down the account and stop "crazy people" from tracking his whereabouts.

After exchanging a few messages, Sweeney eventually gave a counteroffer of $50,000 as he told Musk the money would be a "great support in college" and that it could help him get a car, "maybe even a Model 3."

Musk said he would consider the offer.

Either way, Sweeney is fine with being ghosted, saying he gained a lot of social media followers, learned how to code, and even landed a part-time job as an application developer with UberJets. Now, the self-described Elon Musk "fan" even got to have a conversation with a man he's looked up to for years.

How Does It Work?

@ElonJet is one of the 15 flight-tracking accounts Sweeney has created, all of which are run by bots he's programmed to read the data and tweet every time a chosen plane takes off or lands.

Each one follows a high-profile person, almost all in the tech industry, including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

With roughly 83,000 followers, Musk's tracker is the most popular.

The 15 bots use available Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) information, where it keeps track of when and where planes depart and land, as well as their intended path.

However, Musk's plane, which removes identifying information from the data, is on the LADD block list.

In Sweeney's case, blocked planes are not truly private, as he uses data from the ADS-B transponders present on most aircraft, charted on the ADS-B Exchange, the world's largest public source of unfiltered flight data.

The teen will then parse the information like a logic puzzle, cross-referencing the data with other websites to determine each plane's intended destination.

The information is all entirely public and can be used to track most private aircraft.

One needs a lot of industry-specific knowledge as it's a loophole in high-profile security, but Sweeney had that context: His father works in the airline industry, and Sweeney has been tracking planes since he was a child.

He recalls, like many young boys, he would try to identify types of planes as they flew across the sky, often checking his guesses to what he could find on internet flight tracker apps.

Musk was shocked by how easily accessible the data was when Sweeney revealed where he was getting it.

"It's so primitive," Musk said, referring to air traffic control.

Although the Twitter account hasn't resulted in any dangerous situations so far, fans, stalkers, and other types of people have been known to ambush celebrities at airports.

The most recent Musk and Sweeney exchange was last Wednesday when Sweeney said he'd prefer an internship overpayment in return for deleting the account.

Musk hasn't opened the message, Sweeney said, and he thinks he knows why: "I guess he's on vacation in Hawaii if you check ElonJet."

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Jess Smith

WATCH: Elon Musk offered teen $5K to shut down Twitter account tracking his private flights report - Breaking News World