Who is the young man who upset Elon Musk and is now chasing the trips of the Russian oligarchs – international

At the age of 19, he was a freshman at the University of Central Florida, Jack Sweeney, caught the attention of stakeholders and celebrities in open data. after Russian attacks on Ukrainethe young man has created a bot on Twitter that monitors the private planes of the Russian oligarchs allied with them Russian President Vladimir Putinin addition to the flights of the President of Russia himself.

This isn’t the first time Sweeney has gained fame for being watched. The young man had been tracking the N628TS plane since June 2020, which he identified as the private plane of the Tesla CEO, Elon Musk. The new student has since released maps of his whereabouts and track information on the popular Twitter account, which now has more than 397,000 followers. By the time the robot was born, Musk came Offer $5000 for Sweeney to deactivate the account, but the suggestion was not implemented.

Now, Sweeney’s focus is on the planes of the Russian oligarchs and planes associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The freshman has launched two new bots on Twitter after the first weekend of the Ukraine war: the Tweet embedfocused on Russian business tycoons, and Tweet embedFocus on the Russian president. Together, the accounts add up to more than 500,000 followers as of Monday morning the seventh.

robot Tweet embed Sweeney follows his planes Roman AbramovichAnd steel, metal and pole Former manager of Chelsea Football Club in England; at Leonid Mikhelsondirector and co-owner of Novatek, Russia’s largest independent gas producer; from the businessman Alisher Usmanov, who is frequently mentioned in the list of the richest men in Russia and also an early investor in Facebook and the Chinese electronics company Xiaomi; Among other names.

Usmanov is now among 26 Russian officials and businessmen whose assets have been frozen as a punishment by the European Union to punish the Russian economy.

Jack Sweeney says that when the Russian attacks began, he received messages from his followers asking him to keep an eye on the Russian oligarchy. That was the spark he needed to begin his search for the names and numbers of elite Russian aircraft.

The data crossing that Sweeney used for Russian robotics is the same as Musk’s observation: public data from flying transponders that record longitude, latitude and altitude and calculate location based on an algorithm he created in 2020. These public records are found on the site ADS-B . exchangewhich considers itself the world’s largest public source of unfiltered aviation data.

long time work

Sweeney already has 21 private aircraft monitoring accounts, among which are bots to track all NASA and US Air Force aircraft, as well as the private jets of the businessman and former Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos; Microsoft mogul and entrepreneur, Bill Gates; The former president of the United States, Donald Trumpand artistic celebrities such as the presenter Oprah Winfrey and the actor Jim Carrey. / With information from The Post