Background on story
Jack Sweeney, who is 19 years old made a Twitter devoted to tracking Elon Musk’s movements on his private jet.
The way he gets the info is actually really easy, where all planes being used for private or commercial use for safety reasons are publicly tracked by number and info can be found online.
This isn’t something that hard to find and anyone with about 10-30 minutes work on Google can figure this out.
It was also something I don’t think the public really cared about.
Jack Sweeney on Twitter only has a little under 40,000 followers and before the story came out about the $5,000 offer, his account wasn’t even 10,000 followers.
However, for some reason, Elon Musk offered him $5,000 to shut the account down and he refused, it became a public story and now it looks like he’s been offered a Tesla and hasn’t.
Why he should just take the offer.
Tesla’s prices range quite a bit, but they can go from $44,000 to $110,000.
Lets just assume he’s offered a Model 3, which costs $57,000 currently.
To get an idea of how much that is worth for internet publicity, lets compare with TikTok & Youtube.
YouTube pays an average of $4 per 1,000 views on a video that averages 3-7 minutes.
To get $57,000 off of YouTube, it’d take 14,250,000 views to get paid that much on 3-7 minute videos.
Next up, TikTok.
TikTok focused on short form content doesn’t pay much, where it’s about 4 cents per 1,000 views on average, with some chances for that to go up based on length of video and region watching.
Under TikTok’s current monetization average though, it’d require 1.4 billion views to get paid $57,000.
For Jack Sweeney, it is probably pretty cool to be covered in some major media and get attention, but reality is he’s not getting the exposure a person with 14 million views on YouTube or 1.4 billion TikTok views would get.
My guess is also 99% of people to hear this story don’t even know his name and just know him as “That teenager stalking Elon Musk”.
Also, if he takes the offer, he’d just have to stop tweeting about Elon Musk’s jet use. He can go find a new billionaire to follow or new gimmick.
Besides that, there’s nothing really worth $57,000 here and in a few weeks, most people will forget the story.
So while a free tesla is nothing to Elon, he should just probably take it.