I am a Elon Musk fanboy myself and as we know Google is good at providing suggestions on stories which interests us, But lately, after a huge loss of $25 Billion from Tesla, this was the most recommended stories for me to read, according to Google! So, as most programmers, I dug a little deeper for a better understanding.
#Who is this guy?
The guy who did this was Jack Sweeney, a 19 year old - who is currently a grad student in University of Central Florida. He created a twitter bot which tracks the location of Elon Musk's private jet and tweets it directly to Elon Musk's Jet twitter account.
#How'd he do that?
I just looked into the code in github and it all made sense. He wrote a python bot which gathers the info of the jet by Open Sky Network API which gives data about the transponder of any plane around the globe.
He just captures the takeoff and landing evening with certain intervals which then will be given to a Google Maps API to take a screenshot of the location and posted in twitter using twitter APIs.
#How'd he find Elon's plane?
The answer is simple, unlike most billionaires like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and others, Elon has one private jet which he uses to fly around the globe which made the problem much simple. All he should do was to track a single plane.
#What was Elon's reply?
Elon, like most people who respects his privacy, tried to close this twitter account by providing $5000, but Jack Sweeny replied him that he would need $50,000 and he would use it to buy a Tesla 😁and an internship. Elon Declined!!
#Takeaways
I personally fell this is a great story - just because of the simple fact that just using the open source software and publicly available data and making it a sensation is something which is certainly very interesting.
What's your takeaway on this? Add your thoughts in comments