The teen who tried and failed to get $50,000 to stop publicly tracking Elon Musk’s flights is now going into business—tracking the flights of other CEOs and business leaders.
Jack Sweeney, a 19-year-old freshman at the University of Central Florida, began posting the details of Elon Musk’s flights on a public Twitter account @ElonJet in 2020. When Musk contacted Sweeney in November asking him to stop tracking his private jet for security reasons, and offering him $5,000 to do so, Sweeney turned the offer down and asked for $50,000 or an internship instead. That’s when Musk reportedly walked away.
Sweeney has previously created 15 different flight tracking accounts that kept tabs on notable billionaires like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Donald Trump. But the @ElonJet account has the highest number of followers—281,000.
Now Sweeney is taking his hobby—monitoring the flight activity of billionaires—and turning it into a business, Bloomberg reported.
He intends to parlay the momentum from his brush with Musk into a business called Ground Control, which will monitor the flight activity of high-profile businessmen. A website for the nascent company is currently up and running, selling Elon Musk–related merchandise like T-shirts that say, “I know how high Elon is,” with a depiction of the billionaire smoking a joint, dating back to his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2018.
Flight data or aviation intelligence is a premium service offered by other companies. For instance, Nasdaq Data Link offers corporate travel information as “strong predictive signals for mergers, acquisitions, and other market-moving deals.”
Sweeney did not immediately respond to Coins2Day’ s request for comment.
“Companies in flight tracking have millions in revenue per year,” Sweeney told Bloomberg. “Just a small cut of what they make would be good revenue for me.”
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