A college student from Florida who gained attention for tracking the private jets of a Tesla Inc. Elon Musk and the Russian oligarchs, there is a new target on Twitter: the luxury yachts of the Russian elite.
Jack Sweeney, 19, created @RussiaYachts on Saturday, a Twitter bot that tracks and publishes data on the whereabouts of super-rich Russians on the water. As of Sunday afternoon, the account had over 9,300 followers.
“I just kept getting more and more people in my private messages saying, ‘Can you get into yachting too? So I did it,” Mr. Sweeney said in an interview on Sunday.
His @RussiaYachts account tracks 23 luxury boats, some of them owned by the same Russian billionaires Sweeney tracks in the air. @RUOligarchJets.
Mr Sweeney also created @PutinJetwhich follows an aircraft that may have been used by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Sweeney, a freshman at the University of Central Florida, opened the two accounts on February 26, two days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His @RUOligarchJets account has amassed almost 395,000 followers as of Sunday, while a bot that tracks planes linked to Mr. Putin had more than 102,000 followers.
Mr. Sweeney’s aircraft-tracking bots rely on publicly available aircraft transponder data, which registers longitude, latitude and altitude and calculates location based on an algorithm he created in 2020.
For yachts, Mr Sweeney relies on similar data from on-board safety devices that transmit and track the location of large vessels.
At the moment, he updates his tracking program manually every time the data changes. To get full access to the database of the automatic identification system, which collects information, Mr. Sweeney will have to pay for it, he said.
“I’m not entirely sure how much it will cost because there are different options,” he said. “I just do it by hand until I can automate it.”
Mr Sweeney said one thing is easier about tracking yachts than planes: it’s much easier to figure out which tycoon owns which boat.
Since the beginning of the war, many Russian oligarchs have been placed on US, EU, UK and other sanctions lists, subjecting their yachts, trophy real estate and other trinkets to freezing and other restrictions. Western governments say these oligarchs are cashing in on close ties to Mr. Putin. The scrutiny has turned a group of mostly obscure officials and businessmen into some of the world’s most closely watched individuals.
Authorities have confiscated a number of superyachts and property belonging to some of the Russian billionaires under sanctions.
Mr Sweeney first became famous in early February through his bot account. @ElonJetwhich tracks and publishes the movements of a private jet that it believes belongs to Tesla’s Mr. Musk.
He said Mr. Musk asked him in private messages to delete the account, citing personal security concerns. Mr. Sweeney replied that he would take @ElonJet in exchange for a new Tesla Model 3. Mr. Sweeney said he never received a response from Mr. Musk.