Elon Musk Had No Idea 'How It Worked,' Says Kid Who Annoyed The Billionaire With Jet-Tracking

Jack Sweeney, the “kid” who asked Elon Musk for $50,000 but got banned instead from Twitter, says he wants to pursue artificial intelligence in the future.

What Happened: Sweeney, the Florida student who tracked Musk’s private jet on Twitter, appeared on a podcast named Florida’s Fourth Estate.

During the interview, when asked if meeting his “hero” was “disappointing,” he said, “Oh yeah, it was definitely different.”

Sweeney then went on to say that Musk previously tweeted about his commitment to free speech, saying it extends to not even banning the account following his plane, but “that’s the complete opposite of what he eventually did.”

The @ElonJet account owner was talking about Musk’s tweet posted in November last year.

Sweeney said his intention wasn’t to start a war with the tech billionaire, but things panned out this way.

Speaking about how he started tracking planes, Sweeney said that his father worked in the airline industry, so he used to track his planes as a child. Gradually he became better at this.

“And then I had an interest in Elon Musk and where he was, what he was doing. And then I figured that he had a private jet. And that I could track it myself. But nobody was really doing it. So I started doing it during my free time during COVID,” he said.

Interestingly, Sweeney said that the Tesla CEO, who has some amazing companies under his leadership, had no idea how he tracked his plane.

“So he hit me up in the Twitter DMs and it was like 1 am here in Florida time,” he revealed. “He’s like, ‘Hey, can you take this down?’ And then he ws asking how it worked. He didn’t have really any idea of how it worked. And I was like, ‘You know, I’ve put a lot of work into this (to) just take it down.’ You know, I didn’t really want to.”

He then said Musk offered him $5000 but instead of accepting, he declined and asked for a higher amount, which eventually led to people calling him greedy on the microblogging site.

While Sweeney’s entry into the tech industry was accompanied by controversy, he expressed the desire to pursue a professional career in the field. He mentioned his interest in working with “stuff” like OpenAI’s GPT and software programming in the future.

Sweeney maintains that he still has a passion for aviation and is considering aircraft-related opportunities.

Check out more of Benzinga’s Consumer Tech coverage by following this link.

Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs