Elon Musk offers $5,000 to a student for not tracking his private Gulfstream

Elon Musk offered $5,000 to a college freshman who tracked his private jet to remove his feed.

It's common for wealthy people to avoid flying commercially. An estimated $276 billion in wealth, the South African-born entrepreneur Elon Musk is the owner of a Gulfstream G650 ER private jet. Musk received the N628TS in 2016 and has used it since.

A 19-year-old Jack Sweeny, tracked Musk's private jet and was offered $5,000 to take his feed off the internet. Sweeny shared his findings on his @ElonJet Twitter account, where he has almost 130,000 followers. However, the flight tracking wizard has not accepted the offer, requesting either an internship offer or a $50,000 payment.

Musk's Gulfstream is blocked from all commonly used flight tracking sites, like most private jet owners but it's not invisible. ADS-B and a little bit of smart IT know-how can allow any aircraft to be tracked in almost any part of the world, despite requests to block aircraft from flight tracking websites that display tail numbers. 

Jack Sweeny, a space and aviation enthusiast, created a program that notifies of Elon's jet's movements and has set up a Twitter account called @ElonJet that tweets Elon's movements. He has reportedly offered the 19-year-old thousands of dollars to take down the site, as Elon will not be at ease with everyone knowing his whereabouts.

Landed in Austin, Texas, US. pic.twitter.com/4l7tKiUspp — Elon Musk's Jet (@ElonJet) January 26, 2022

Earlier this year, Protocol reported that Jack Sweeny received an unexpected direct message on Twitter by Elon Musk himself,“Can you take this down? It is a security risk.”Musk had to wait almost seven hours for a reply after sending the message after midnight Sweeny's time. Jokingly, he replied,“Yes I can but it’ll cost you a Model 3 only joking unless?”

The popularity of the @ElonJet account surprised the billionaire. The account had 80,000 followers at the time he made the offer. Following the recent publicity surrounding their conversation, it now has 127K followers, and keeps growing!