Elon Musk Twitter purchase: Could a UCF freshman have had something to do with it?
ORLANDO, Fla. - FOX 35 News first spoke to University of Central Florida student Jack Sweeney three months ago when he received a message on Twitter from Elon Musk himself. Now that Musk is buying Twitter, we wanted to catch up with Sweeney to see what he had to say.
Here’s a fun theory: Sweeney said some believe Musk may have purchased Twitter because of him. When Sweeney made the Twitter bot @ElonJet that tracks Musk’s private jet and tweets his whereabouts, Musk offered him $5,000 to close the account. Sweeney refused. The account has gone viral with more than 429,000 followers. First, Musk blocked him. Now Musk bought Twitter.
"A week ago, after there was news of him buying stocks and all that, at some point we noticed that he unblocked the @ElonJet account," said Sweeney. "Now I’m a meme. There’s people making memes, ‘He spent $44 billion just to kick this kid off Twitter,’ so it’s pretty funny -- not that I completely believe it, but it’s just funny. There’s always the slightest chance. Who knows?"
Sweeney said he is going to keep his @ElonJet Twitter account. So the big question now is does he think Musk will shut it down?
"In regards to me, I don’t know what could happen. He definitely doesn’t like my accounts," Sweeney said, "but if he did something, then people would call him a hypocrite and stuff. If he calls it a safety issue, he could still do it. I don’t know. Who knows what’ll happen?"
Sweeney said he has picked up 20,000 new followers on the @ElonJet account in just the last few days since Musk announced he’s buying Twitter. Sweeney has also made an account that tracks the jets of about 30 Russian oligarchs, @RUOligarchJets.
"After the whole Russia-Ukraine thing, people wanted the Russian Oligarchs, so that blew up."
Besides the Musk offer, he has also gotten several job offers, but he’s turned them down.
"They’re not too interesting. They’re just little companies mostly," said Sweeney.
For now, Sweeney is quietly and humbly riding the attention he has been getting, gaining thousands of followers on his accounts and enjoying the community he says he’s built.
"There’s also people that are open-source intelligence, and they think I’m doing good stuff on Twitter by sharing and creating awareness that you can track planes. Having the tracking community on Twitter is pretty cool."