Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has reportedly blocked Jack Sweeney on Twitter, who created a Twitter bot that tracks Musk’s Gulfstream private jet and posts real-time updates of its location from publicly available data. According to The Guardian, while Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to delete the bot @ElonJet, Sweeney asked for $50,000. Musk declined to pay and has now blocked Sweeney on the micro-blogging site. The billionaire reached out to the 19-year-old last November to express concern about the bot. Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to stop tweeting about his jets. However, Sweeney turned down Musk’s offer and instead demanded $50,000, saying that the amount would cover his college fees and also help him buy a Tesla car.
The negotiation between Musk and Sweeney reportedly happened over several direct messages on Twitter.
On January 26, Sweeney said he would prefer an internship over payment in exchange for deleting the account.
“I understand your view, but I hope that you would see my interest because I have been developing this since I was only in high school," Sweeney told Musk.
The recent years have seen a record breaking growth in SpaceX and Tesla which has cemented Musk as the undisputed disruptor of the world. And the ‘brand Musk’ has become so big that just the tweets of the 49-year-old inventor are enough to shake the markets.
Here are some examples of the Musk Effect:
-In January 2021, the Tesla CEO simply changed his Twitter bio to ‘Bitcoin’ leading to the cryptocurrency shooting 14 percent in value.
-The following month, Musk announced that Tesla has bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, and will soon start accepting the virtual currency as a genuine mode of payment for the electric vehicles. This made Bitcoin reach fresh record highs.
-Using his brand power, Musk has boosted the value of Dogecoin – a crypto-meme that was originally created to mock cryptocurrencies. The multi-billionaire went after Dogecoin so hard that he made the decision to dump Bitcoin last week, saying the cryptocurrency will not be used anymore to buy Tesla vehicles, citing ‘environmental risks’ associated with the virtual currency. This led to Bitcoin’s value tumbling to three-month low.
-Another example of the Musk effect was when he just tweeted in support of messaging app Signal amid the controversial data policy of Whatsapp. His two-word ‘Use Signal’ endorsement boosted the app’s downloads overnight. However, irony hit really hard when an unrelated company with the same name saw its stock price soaring. The tweet had come in the wake of Whatsapp introducing a new data policy which mandatorily had to be accepted by the app users.
-There are numerous other examples to assert the power of the ‘Musk Effect’ including the incident of e-commerce company Etsy witnessing a surge in its stock price when Musk just tweeted, “I kinda like Etsy.”
( With IANS Inputs)
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