19-Year-Old Wants $50k From Elon Musk, Says $5k Won’t Compensate For The Fun

Jack Sweeney, the 19-year old boy who was offered $5,000 by Elon Musk to stop the bot Twitter account that tracks Musk’s private jet, has turned down the offer, saying the satisfaction he had would be compensated for no less than $50,000, according to the Business Insider.

Earlier this month, Musk tweeted, some social media accounts that were sharing his whereabouts were "becoming a security issue."

Sweeney runs a Twitter account with the handle ElonJet, which tracks Musk’s private jet and tweets where it takes off and where it lands.

Upon finding out about the Twitter account, Musk reached out to Sweeney and offered $5,000 to stop sharing the whereabouts of his private jet, in a midnight DM, which read: "Can you take this down? It is a security risk", according to the Protocol. 

Musk then offered to pay Sweeney $5,000 following a few back-and-forth messages saying, "How about $5k for this account and generally helping make it harder for crazy people to track me?", but Sweeney replied with a countered offer, "Any chance to up that to $50k? It would be a great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a Model 3", reported Protocol. 

In the Twitter conversation, Sweeney told Musk how his bots are able to track his private jet and gave some advised advice on how to potentially make it less trackable. Musk replied, “Air Traffic Control is so primitive.” Musk might be joking about the Air Traffic Control being primitive, but knowing him, he might be serious as well.

Even though Musk told Sweeney he'd consider his demands, the duo had no communication afterward.

"I've done a lot of work on this and 5k is not enough," Sweeney told Insider and added that $5,000 wouldn’t compensate for "the fun” he has while working on it.

The 19-year old added that Musk seems to have implemented his technical advice, at least some of it, and started using a blocking system that changes his jet's identifier, thus making it more difficult to track, and said, "I just have to work around it."

The Twitter account uses a bot programmed by Sweeney, gathers the data which is publicly available, and tweets the movements of  Musk’s private jet. He also runs several other such bots that follow the private planes of the world’s richest such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.