4 ms·

19-year-old built a flight-tracking Twitter bot. Musk tried to pay him to stop

• sha256sum 5y ago
  > The account's popularity appears to have scared Musk. “I don’t love the idea of being shot by a nutcase,” he told Sweeney in their DM conversation. Jeez, what a stupid comment. Any motivated attacker can still follow his flights and do this. He’s a public figure with more money than god. Hire a security team or stop jetsetting!
• thebruce87m 5y ago
  As soon as the owner of the bot made Elons DM public, he guaranteed he’ll never get paid a penny. Now that it is publicly known that there is value to it then there is a financial incentive for someone else to make a bot too. This coupled with the fact that the data it’s based upon is public means anyone can make one. If a deal had been struck privately and the bot had quietly went offline then there’s a chance nobody would have noticed or cared enough to make a replacement.