A teenager from Florida, who has got a lot of traction on social media for tracking private jet of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is currently tracking the planes movement of Russian business leaders associated with President Vladmir Putin.
Jack Sweeney, who is just 19, has shot to fame for his hobby of following private plane of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and sharing the movements of plane on Twitter with the id @ElonJet. Elon Musk has personally reached out to him on the platform asking that he shut down the account.
The story doesn't end there. His new obsession is now monitoring Russian oligarchs and aircraft associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In an interview to Wall Street Journal, he said that he got many requests from Twitter followers that he should track Putin.
Sweeney created new Twitter bots -- @RUOligarchJets and @Putinjet -- after Russia invaded Ukraine. Once the attacks began, he started researching the names and plane tail numbers of the Russian elite, too.
Sweeney’s Twitter bots make use of publicly available data from plane transponders that log longitude, latitude and altitude and calculate location based on an algorithm he created in 2020.
@RUOligarchJetsaccount has nearly 267,000 followers as of Wednesday night. And the bot tracking planes that might be used by Putin had more than 51,000 followers.
“I don’t think he’ll be leaving the country right now," Mr. Sweeney said in an interview.
Sweeney’s bot also follows planes owned by Roman Abramovich, the oligarch owner of England’s popular Chelsea Football Club, as well as aircraft owned by Leonid Mikhelson, head of Novatek, Russia’s largest private natural-gas company, and businessman Alisher Usmanov, often cited as Russia’s richest man, according to the Wall Street Journal.
