Elon Musk has offered a teenager $5,000 to take down a Twitter account about him. That account tweets every time Musk’s private jet takes off and lands, and the wealthy South African thinks that is dangerous.
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It was 13 minutes after midnight when Jack Sweeney (19)’s smartphone suddenly lit up last spring. A private message on Twitter, he saw. From none other than the richest man in the world: Elon Musk. “Can you stop it? This is dangerous,” he wrote.
Musk was talking about the Twitter account @ElonJet. That sends a tweet every time Elon Musk’s private jet takes off or leaves somewhere. Sweeney created the account, and did the same for the private jets of the likes of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. The accounts are popular, Musk’s has 123,900 followers.
5.000 dollar
But Musk was not served by it, his message showed. Sweeney didn’t answer until the next morning. “You can, but it will cost you a Tesla Model 3.” Musk didn’t want to hear about that. “I don’t like the idea of getting shot by a lunatic one day,” he replied, offering $5,000 to delete the account that Sweeney says earns $20 a month. “Can you raise that amount to $50,000?” the student tried, without success for the time being. And so @ElonJet just kept on tweeting.
The student told his story Protocol and corroborated that by sending some screenshots. Likewise, what he sent last Wednesday that has not yet been read by Musk. “What I want more than the money is an internship.” Did he know why Musk hadn’t replied yet? “Looking at ElonJet, I think he’s on vacation in Hawaii,” the student said.
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