Jack Sweeney: the man who made Elon Musk "mad", spied on Putin's plane, Bill Gates to blackmail

Jack Sweeney (born 2002) is an American programmer and entrepreneur. He suddenly gained notoriety for creating Twitter bots to spy on the jets of Russian oligarchs and other famous individuals, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Sweeney's father was a Technical Operations Controller for American Airlines. He introduced him to aviation when he was still a c.hild. Sweeney often used data to track his father when he traveled from Dallas back home to Florida.

In 2022, Sweeney passed the University of Central Florida, and studied information technology. At that time, he plans to work in software engineering. However, in February 2022, Sweeney announced in an interview with Bloomberg Wealth that he was forming a company called "Ground Control" that monitors the flight operations of famous billionaires.

Since June 2020, Jack has been writing a program to collect Elon Musk's flight data from public sources. Jack's activities are not illegal because the data is shared by the FAA.

Not long after, he decided to expand the "scale of operations" - he decided to "stalk" the entire travel route of many other famous billionaires. At that time, Sweeney said he was deploying an app called Ground Control to implement this plan, targeting big names like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.

Sweeney's purpose is simple and clear: he needs m.oney and wants to make a lot of m.oney from Ground Control. This is not a far-fetched thing when some other companies such as Nasdaq Data Link have long pursued this model and made a profit by providing private aviation and business data to their customers.

In an interview, Sweeney said: "Flight tracking companies can make millions of dollars a year. Just a small corner of them is a big revenue for me."

In February 2022, Scott Painter, CEO of Autonomy, a car rental company, offered Sweeney a long-term subscription. The CEO demanded that Sweeney quickly delete Musk's plane-tracking account. The Wall Street Journal reports that this subscription has a duration of up to 3 years.

However, Sweeney replied: "I said I don't care about the subscription, other than that, there are a lot of factors that suggest this has something to do with Elon."

Speaking to Protocol, Sweeney said he first received an offer from the Tesla CEO in the fall of 2021: "Can you disable this account? This is a security risk!" The 20-year-old offered a Model 3 in exchange. Elon Musk immediately got angry and texted back quite harshly: "Don't try to 'play' me."

After a bit of back and forth, Elon Musk decided to make an offer worth $ 5000. However, Jack is still not satisfied and wants to receive 10 times the same amount, or an internship opportunity at one of the companies owned by Musk.

After negotiations failed, Elon Musk decided to ignore Sweeney "do whatever he wants" and even blocked him on Twitter.

It is known that in July 2022, Sweeney posted that billionaire Elon Musk's jet made 5-minute flights from Los Angeles International Airport to Hawthorne Airport - a journey of 9.6 km that if riding Tesla would only take 10 minutes. 

Elon Musk's rage exploded when, at the end of 2022, Sweeney's personal Twitter account was suspended. Billionaire Musk said: "Posting someone else's location in real time violates the doxxing policy, but it's okay to update the location afterwards." Doxxing is understood as the act of publicly distributing sensitive information of an individual or organization, such as a home address or phone number, for ill-gotten gain.

Without surrendering, Sweeney set up an account called "elonmusksjet" on Threads in early July 2023 shortly after Mata launched the platform. However, the 20-year-old hacker's new account was out of luck. Not long after its launch, elonmusksjet was temporarily blocked. Sweeney appealed and successfully reopened. So far, Sweeney has not made a new move. Whether or not his account on Threads will be maintained r.emains open.

Sweeney also once swaggered saying, "Elon has all these resources. So much m.oney and so much control — he can send rockets and satellites out into space — but he can't stop me from tracking his plane," Sweeney said. "It feels great. He's one of the richest people on Earth and I'm bothering him."

In fact, the Tesla CEO isn't the only person Sweeney is watching. In March of this year, Sweeney turned his talents to a new topic: Russian oligarchs and their assets. He created a new account - tracking the whereabouts of yachts owned by the Russian billionaire. Simply called Russian Yachts.

The account has become the new tracking tool used to track the whereabouts of some of Russia's wealthiest executives; Post the time and place of their aircraft taking off and landing, the yacht route to depart, dock ...

Another account set up to track flights registered to Putin and Russian VIPs. Although Sweeney warned in a tweet that, don't expect it to be very accurate as there are some VIP planes that don't have as much flight data available in Russia as in some other places.

Then in May, the college student said he rediscovered Mark Zuckerberg's plane after the Facebook founder appeared on the jet. Earlier this year, he told Insider that he stopped following Mark Cuban's jet on Twitter, after the billionaire investor offered him business advice in return.

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