Reports: Teen Who Tracks Musk’s Plane Begins Tracking Russian Oligarchs

Russian President Vladimir Putin exits his plane on arrival at Mehrabad airport in Tehran,
AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi
Nick Gilbertson

A Florida college student, who created a viral Twitter account that tracks Elon Musk’s plane, has made two new accounts that he says follow Russian Oligarchs’ planes and helicopters as well as aircraft linked to Russian President Vladamir Putin and VIPs, based on publicly available data.

Jack Sweeney, a 19-year-old Freshman at the University of Central Florida (UCF), recently set up two Twitter bots: @RUOligarchJets and @PutinJet. Together, they have garnered almost 330,000 followers.

He established the bot accounts over the weekend after receiving requests from others to make them, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

“Even before this war started, people were saying to me, ‘Oh, you should track Putin,'” he told the outlet.

Sweeney’s bots track the planes using “public data from plane transponders that log longitude, latitude, and altitude and calculate location based on an algorithm he created in 2020,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

So far, he has kept tabs on 40 aircraft he believes to be linked to Russian oligarchs, according to the outlet. Roman Abramovich, the owner of the highly popular Chelsea Football Club in England, is one of the Russian elites Sweeney says he is tracking. Along with Abramovich, the teen is also claiming to follow the movements of Leonid Mikhelson, who is the head of Russian private natural gas company Novatek, and Alisher Usmanov, one of Russia’s wealthiest individuals who the European Union recently sanctioned, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The aircrafts these oligarchs have are absolutely crazy,” Sweeney recently told Bloomberg. He added that Russia’s tycoons were using commercial-sized aircraft for travel, including planes like a Boeing 737 and an Airbus A319.

“Their planes are huge compared to other jets,” noted the UCF student. 

Last month, the teen made headlines after claiming Musk offered him $5,000 to terminate the account tracking the Tesla CEO’s whereabouts.

“He reaches out to me, and he asked ‘Can you take this down?’ Then he was like, he doesn’t like the whole system, calling it primitive and everything, then he offers me $5,000 to take it down,” Sweeney told WOFL.

“I’d put in so much work and time, and it’s something I enjoy doing and 5K doesn’t seem like a lot for how much I get out of it and I enjoy doing it,” the teen noted.

Sweeney countered with an offer to take down the account for $50,000 and an internship from Musk – which was rejected by the billionaire, WOFL reports.

He told the Journal that he would take down the account in exchange for a new Tesla Model 3.

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