A Florida-based teen who recently hit headlines for tracking Elon Musk’s private jet has now set up Twitter profiles to track Russian oligarchs and billionaires.
Jack Sweeney claims he was recently approached by the SpaceX CEO and asked to remove the profile that details his every movement, but refused, and now has amassed over 300,000 followers on his latest pages.
The 19-year-old uses publicly available air-traffic information that he says allows him to "reveal what business is going on.”
Sweeney recently launched two new Twitter accounts under the handles @RUOligarchJets and @Putinjet and is following planes and jets used by Russia’s richest, and even by President Vladimir Putin according to its bio.
The two new pages have attracted thousands of people following the live updates of the private jets' movements along with pictures of maps locating them.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the university student said since the publication of the profile following Musk, he has received thousands of suggestions from followers.
Most recently, those requests have been focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine after sanctions began to take effect for Russian billionaires.
Some of the jets tracked by the new accounts include Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich, businessman Alisher Usmanov - with an estimated net worth of $19.5 billion - and Leonid Mikhelson, the billionaire chairman of the Russian gas producer, Novatek.
Sweeney said he was shocked by the size of the planes being used by the Russian oligarchs, in an interview with Bloomberg recently.
He said: "The aircrafts these oligarchs have are absolutely crazy.”
They are reportedly traveling on commercial-sized luxury aircrafts like Airbus A319s and Boeing 737, and Sweeney says, "their planes are huge compared to other jets."
The accounts track more than 40 planes and helicopters linked to Russian oligarchs at the moment, but the 19-year-old has now asked others to help in order to increase the number of planes that can be tracked.
