A few months ago a student at a university in Florida, Jack Sweenie, 19 years old, a profile picture on Twitter in a white shirt and red tie, received private direct message from Elon Musk. For a couple of years the boy has created Twitter profiles managed by an algorithm that send a tweet every time some private aircraft take off or land. Nothing secret. It does this using public data, flight logs (here the operation); but do you want to make a difference? Instead of getting lost in endless and rather complex searches, there is a tweet that warns you.
He left with the jet of Elon Musk, his idol, but then given the success of the thing, from September 2020 he added another dozen, including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Musk doesn’t like this at all and you understand why: for example, according to @elonjet, the Twitter bot that follows him, his plane landed in Austin, Texas on January 26 just before midnight. We all know. Was Musk on board too? This is another matter as we will see.
In short, Elon Musk himself wrote a Twitter DM to Jack Sweenie a few months ago: there is a security problem, he told him, can you delete that bot? It was night, perhaps the student was asleep, and so he replied seven hours later: “I could, but it could cost you a Tesla Model 3,” she told him jokingly. Then Musk claimed that he feared being the victim of an attack by a madman (“I Don’t Like The Idea Of ??Getting Shot By A Lunatic”); he had an explanation of how the bot works (concluding that: “Air Traffic Control Is So Primitive”); asked how much the student earns with that bot (twenty dollars a month, the answer, change) and at that point Musk, who has a fortune of over 200 billion dollars, offered five thousand demonstrating either that he cares very little for his personal safety or to assess the risk of that non-existent bot, but just a nuisance. Reply: “No chance of having 50,000? It would help me pay for my studies ”.
According to some versions, the boy studies information technology according to other aerospace engineering. But let’s move on. Faced with this request Musk, the richest man in the world, said “I’ll think about it” and disappeared: the student waited a bit then proposed to Musk to turn that money into an internship at Tesla or SpaceX and finally he decided to tell the story by increasing the followers of @elonjet from 80 thousand to 120 thousand in a few days.
Regrets? they asked him. No, he replied, I learned how to develop a bot, I found a job, I have many more followers. Musk, on the other hand, seems to have started playing cat and mouse with the bot: he starts his plane even when he is not on board, rather when he is engaged in public events, or the other day he took another private flight but immediately Jack Sweenie posted the screenshot proving he caught him anyway. (attached image)
If I were in Musk one like this I would immediately take him aboard. Maybe it will end like this.
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