ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — A 19-year-old Florida college student recently made headlines after creating a Twitter account tracking Elon Musk's private jet — and now he's back at it with a different person as the main focus.
Jack Sweeney, who runs @PutinJet, launched the account which tracks Russian VIP jets and any jets that Russian President Vladimir Putin may be using.
The account tweets out the location of the jet, where it landed, where it took off from and how long it was in the air.
Sweeney made the account over the weekend after Russia invaded Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reports.
“Even before this war started, people were saying to me, ‘Oh, you should track Putin,’” he said in an interview with the media outlet Tuesday.
Once the attacks began, the teen reportedly got messages from his followers urging him to research the names and plane tail numbers of Russian leaders.
The University of Central Florida student was able to create the new account pretty quickly by using a list of planes being tracked by a blog called "Radar Spots," according to Bloomberg Wealth. In just a matter of days, the account gained more than 53,000 followers.
“The aircrafts these oligarchs have are absolutely crazy,” Sweeney said to Bloomberg. “Their planes are huge compared to other jets.”
So what exactly does the account track? A handful of things.
Tabs are kept on various aircraft from helicopters, private jets and commercial-sized airplanes, including ones owned by Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin — not to be mistaken with Vladimir Putin.
@PutinJet now has more than 82,000 followers and seems to garner a lot of traffic with each tweet, posting every couple of hours.
Around 6 a.m. Thursday, there was a jet that reportedly landed near Moscow which was in the air for four hours and 37 minutes.
In January, Elon Musk himself reportedly asked Sweeney to delete the original @ElonJet account, claiming it was a "security risk."
While Sweeney told Protocol that Musk offered him $5,000 to delete the account, the 19-year-old had something else in mind.
“Yes I can but it’ll cost you a Model 3 only joking unless?” One reply to Musk read, according to the news outlet.
Another is reported to have asked the billionaire to add a 0 to his offer to up it to $50,000, Protocol reports.
So far, the two haven't come to any deal.
