Sweeney Track's Putin's Jets - and Trump's!

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Early last month I used this space to discuss Jack Sweeney, a 19-year-old college freshman in Florida, who has been tracking the flight paths of some of the world's billionaires and then posting that information on the internet.  According to news articles from various sources, Sweeney has created a program that matches plane transponder frequencies with separately available anonymous flight plans and can thereby predict which billionaires (or celebrities) are headed where.  That information is then fed into automated Twitter postings.

Sweeney's work has been especially annoying to Elon Musk, the world's richest human, and Musk went on Twitter several weeks ago and offered Sweeney $5,000 to remove his account, @ElonJet, which tracks Musk's private flights.  Musk said that he feared being shot by some nut who gained access to his location through information provided by Sweeney.  

Jack Sweeney declined Elon Musk's offer of $5,000 and countered that he'd would do it for $50,000.  Musk, whose worth increased by more than $40 billion recently over the course of just one day, refused to pony-up the additional $45,000.  Sweeney, a student of information systems, has also expressed an interest in getting an internship with Musk or a new Tesla in exchange for taking down his Twitter site that tracks Musk's movements.

This week it was learned that Jack Sweeney isn't "cooling his jets" while waiting on Elon Musk to cough up a new Tesla, but has instead expanded his operation to include publishing information on the private flights of Russia's billionaire oligarchs as well as the Big Kahuna himself, Vladimir Putin.  @PutinJet on Twitter follows several official jets on which Vlad has been known to travel, but the site obviously can't guarantee that the Russian leader is on any particular flight.  (The ones being reported on today all seem to be staying relatively close to Moscow)

Sweeney (@JxckSweeney on Twitter) is also tracking a couple of planes known to be frequently used by Donald Trump.  Their flights can be followed on Twitter @TrumpJets.

We may not all be able to pack at a moment's notice and fly off to wherever in the world our whims take us, but thanks to the efforts of a tech-savvy and ballsy college student in Florida, we can at least know where the rich and famous are heading.

Thanks, Jack.