After facing off against Elon Musk, 19-year-old Jack Sweeney has turned his attention to a new quarry: Russia’s billionaires. Sweeney, who shot to internet fame last month after turning down a $5,000 offer from Musk to stop tracking his private jet via Twitter bot, has begun documenting the comings and goings of powerful Russian oligarchs, whose movements have attracted intense scrutiny in the wake of the Ukraine invasion. @RUOligarchJets, launched over the weekend, was tracking 39 private planes and helicopters belonging to 19 tycoons as of Monday. By that afternoon, the account had amassed nearly 60,000 followers.
“It’s just been crazy,” Sweeney, a University of Central Florida freshman, said. He readily admitted to outlets like NBC News that he had little understanding of elite Russian power structures, but as several oligarchs moved to scoot their superyachts to friendlier waters earlier on Monday, experts said that unearthing their travel movements could prove invaluable. “They should be exposed,” one professor of international affairs told NBC, “and they should be paying whatever price a country can extract from them.”
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