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Salon
Salon
Politics
Kelly McClure

Track Elon Musk's Jet with a Twitter bot

SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk at the Axel Springer Award 2020 in Berlin Britta Pedersen-Pool/Getty Images

Elon Musk, the 50-year-old billionaire who has made a name for himself by wheeling and dealing in technology offered a Florida teenager $5,000 to shut down a Twitter account in 2020. Why? Because the account uses public ADS-B data to track the comings and goings of Musk's private jet for the now viral account, Elon Musk's Jet, and Musk didn't like it.

The owner of the account, Jack Sweeney, turned down Musk's offer, and continues to track Musk's air-traffic to this day. In fact, he's expanded to create accounts to track the private jets of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and most recently, Russian oligarchs associated with Putin. 

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