The teenager who published the whereabouts of Elon Musk’s jet in real-time is a fan and meant the billionaire no harm. He took information made publicly available and posted it to Twitter. The company that sold him the data, however, did it for profit, and Musk wasn’t having it.
The company, Private Plane Trackers of America, uses anonymous information to make its best guesses about where planes are, then they coordinate with people on the ground at airports to corroborate the details. It’s all very high-tech. They sell the data on the dark web, where people like Sweeney buy it, sometimes for thousands of dollars.
Musk’s answer to the problem was simple. He bought the company, fired everyone, and strip-mined it like a bad Midler-Tomlin movie. We reached out to the previous owner, Joe Barron, for his thoughts. “Don’t mess with Elon Musk,” he said, “he spent $47 million to shut us down, just because he could.”
Sweeney, the teenager who started the ruckus, denies buying the data and says he resents the implication. “I built a network of bots that used anonymized versions of FAA flight path data combined with transponder information in real-time to determine where the plane would be, and the best you can do is ‘he bought the info?’ You clowns need a smarter audience.”
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