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A teenager that tweets out the location of Elon Musk's private jet has vowed to continue annoying Musk, even if he does succeed in taking over the social media platform.
Jack Sweeney, who tweets out Musk's jet's location using the account Elon Jet has confirmed he will continue to keep people updated on the jet's position, even if it means doing so through other social media platforms.
Elon Musk had previously attempted to stop Sweeny, offering him $5,000 to stop tracking his jet. Sweeny, who started the project in 2020, declined the offer and asked for $50,000 instead. Despite this being peanuts compared to, for example, the $44 billion Musk has offered for Twitter, the Tesla CEO and free speech champion instead decided to block him.
"I created it because I'm really interested in Elon Musk, and Tesla and SpaceX, and it would be interesting to see where he goes and what business he's up to," Sweeney told the Guardian at the time.
"I asked for $50,000, he said 'thinking about it', then after a while last week he said 'I don't think it's right to pay to take this down', and just the other night he blocked me. I asked for 50 grand because it would be nice to help for college and I also thought it would be cool if I could buy a Tesla, you know like a Model 3 or something."
Sweeney, who has since moved on to targeting Russian oligarchs recently tweeted that his account "has every right to post jet whereabouts," adding that "ADS-B data is public, every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder, Even [...] Twitter policy states data found on other sites is allowed to be shared here as well."
How this will sit with Musk's "town square" vision for Twitter as a bastion of free speech is unclear.
