Jack Sweeney gained fame after his unique pastime of tracking Tesla, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s private jet became well-known. He’s developed a new interest. Sweeney has started revealing the movements of planes affiliated with Russian President Vladimir Putin as part of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The 19-year-old Florida teen is tweeting the real-time position of Russian oligarchs’ flights, as well as planes affiliated with Putin. He has created two new Twitter bot accounts, @RUOligarchJets, and @Putinjet, via which he constantly updates users on the location of Russian billionaires and President Vladimir Putin’s private planes.
Sweeney is enthusiastically servicing his followers who just requested him to track Putin at a time when activities relating to Russia should be kept under wraps so as not to attract unnecessary attention.
In an interview, he recalled one of his followers saying, “Oh, you should monitor Putin.” He said he had demands to track Putin even before the war began, but the number of requests from his online followers skyrocketed once Russia began fighting Ukraine.
The demands now included a request for him to track the movements of Russian oligarchs and elites’ private planes.
Sweeney’s new Twitter bots employ the same technology as the one used to track the jet he says belongs to Elon Musk.
Musk contacted Sweeney over Twitter and requested that he stop tracking his plane’s movements using the well-known Twitter bot account @ElonJet.
Sweeney’s plane-tracking bots use publicly available data from plane transponders, which maintain track of a plane’s longitude, latitude, and altitude, to compute its whereabouts with an algorithm he devised in 2020.
As of Tuesday afternoon, his @RUOligarchJets account had over 175,000 followers. And the bot that was tracking planes that Mr. Putin might utilize has over 30,000 followers.
Sweeney replied, “I don’t think he’ll be leaving the nation right now.”
Sweeney’s bot tracks planes owned by Roman Abramovich, the oligarch who owns Chelsea Football Club in England, and planes owned by Leonid Mikhelson, the CEO of Novatek, Russia’s largest private natural-gas company, and businessman Alisher Usmanov, who was often referred to as Russia’s richest man.
Mr. Usmanov is now one of 26 prominent Russian politicians and businessmen sanctioned by the European Union, which has frozen their assets and imposed travel bans in an effort to penalize Russia’s economy. In recent days, some oligarchs have distanced themselves from Mr. Putin.
Sweeney’s account has followed the movements of about 40 planes and helicopters related to Russian oligarchs as of Tuesday. Mr. Sweeney has urged aviation enthusiasts from around the world to assist him in tracking responder data by utilizing the registered tail numbers he has released on his Russian Jet Oligarch account.
Sweeney said he’s still following Tesla CEO Elon Musk and repeated his position that he’d shut down the account in exchange for a new Tesla Model 3.
However, he stated that he had no desire to profit from the accounts he set up against Mr. Putin and the Russian billionaires.
“I don’t believe we should be at war,” he remarked. “It’s time for us to be more peaceful.”
Published By: Jaspreet Singh
Edited By: Kritika Kashyap
