Billionaires Suffer Another Indignity

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Yesterday in this space I commented on the fact that the city of Rotterdam in The Netherlands will have to temporarily take down an historic bridge in order to allow American billionaire - and the world's second richest human - Jeff Bezos - to get his vanity vessel - the world's largest ship with sails - out to sea.  However, the city fathers of Rotterdam aren't howling too loudly over this egregious accommodation to obscene amounts of wealth and power.  Bezos did pay $500 million to have his luxury ship built in their city, and he will also pay for the temporary deconstruction and rebuilding of the bridge - so Jeff has been quite a boon to their local economy.

But that bridge wasn't the only fly in Jeff Bezos's soup.  He is also one of 125 or so rich and influential people who are having their private aircraft tracked by by a nosy teenager who then publishes details of their travel to the internet.

Jack Sweeney is a young man with a promising future - perhaps as an influential player in the tech industry, or maybe as a missing person.   Sweeney is currently a freshman studying information technology at the University of Central Florida.  Two years ago - when he was just seventeen - young Mr. Sweeney, a self-professed fan of the world's richest human, Elon Musk, wrote some computer code that was able to "source" the billionaire's flight information from websites which were available to the public.  He then managed to get Musk's flight information to post automatically to a special Twitter account, an account that was soon followed by a couple of hundred thousand individuals.

Over the ensuing months Sweeney expanded his efforts to include other well known rich folks, such as Jeff Bezos, but still it all seemed to be for his personal amusement rather than for monetary gain.  He has expanded to multiple sites and had sold a few ads, supposedly totaling around five hundred dollars, but the lad seemed content not trying to parlay his work into some get-rich-quick scheme.

But then Musk, who said he worries about being shot by some crazy, contacted Jack Sweeney and offered him $5,000 to quit posting his travel information.  At that point Mr. Sweeney said he realized that he could perhaps make some real money off of his work.  He gave Elon Musk, who is worth around $270 billion, a counter-offer of $50,000 - and Elon Musk turned him down!

Alexa, play "Hey, Big Spender!"

Perhaps this might be the right time for Jack Sweeney to create a Twitter account that tracks his own location!