Back on Christmas Eve of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter’s Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees wer…
Stop making stupid people famous!
This behaviour isn’t because he’s famous it’s because he’s incredibly wealthy and no one has ever told him no.
While this is of course true, to me part of saying him no is not giving him media attention. If his stunts didn’t have the publicity they do, he might not actually do them. If people stopped caring about whatever shit he writes on Twitter then he wouldn’t have a power to destroy Starlink’s government deal or affect stock values.
They were somewhere over Las Vegas when James made his suggestion that they could move them now. It was the type of impulsive, impractical, surge-into-the-breach idea that Musk loved.
Musk and his renegade team were rolling servers out without putting them in crates or swaddling them in protective material, then using store-bought straps to secure them in the truck. “I’ve never loaded a semi before,” James admitted.
The moving contractors that NTT wanted them to use charged $200 an hour. So James went on Yelp and found a company named Extra Care Movers that would do the work at one-tenth the cost.
The servers had user data on them, and James did not initially realize that, for privacy reasons, they were supposed to be wiped clean before being moved. … So James sent someone to Home Depot to buy big padlocks, and they sent the combination codes on a spreadsheet to Portland so the trucks could be opened there. “I can’t believe it worked,” James says.
LMAO who’s this James guy and why does he understand Musk so thoroughly like his own spouse?
Plot twist: Elon and James are the same person. Like in Fight Club.
James is the personality that comes out during particularly extreme manic episodes.
But that would make him cool somehow.
Then think of him like OJ Simpson and Charlie. Problem solved.
So all the dumb shit that Musk has done over the past year is all just part of project mayhem. (Don’t eat the soup, it has piss in it)
I think James is Elon’s cousin.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-has-hired-two-cousins-to-work-at-twitter-2022-12
James Musk is more of as “a fixer type,” helping Elon Musk on various tasks, one insider said.
Twitter employees must’ve dreaded seeing this guy. “Oh no, Elon is with James again. Shit is about to hit the fan”
I can’t imagine how annoying that would be. Companies with family members as employees, especially startups, are the WORST and most toxic you can get.
A former company was full of nepotism. Chinese managed company with all the stereotypical inner circle politics.
The CEO’s daughter was appointed “chief Green officer”. We got metal bottle waters.
The daughters boyfriend was put in Sales, and never sold a thing.
To be fair, that seems to be the best case scenario for nepotism. Imagine if the daughter and her boyfriend were put into positions of real power without the expertise to back it up. The dad seems to understand and put them kids into harmless job role.
Chinese take nepotism to a new level
But a cousin of Musk suggested to Musk that they just do it themselves, while they were flying from the Bay Area to Austin
On CHRISTMAS FUCKING EVE! He has like 10 kids. He started a fire drill for employees on Christmas Eve, they have families too. What a cartoonishly villainous thing to do.
He got lucky nothing disappeared.
At a previous work place they rounded up a few employees to move stuff from one office to the new office. That ended up with a few monitors less than they started with. They couldn’t ask who took it because they never wrote down who they rounded up for the move.
And that’s how companies end up with a bunch of silly regulations how you’re not allowed to move any hardware to the next room
Seriously. A crew with no IDs and some of them formerly homeless hauling around hundreds of thousands of dollars of servers all secured with “big” padlocks. What could go wrong? Not like the crew could get a bolt cutter to open the padlocks and then sell the servers. I doubt many people would have qualms with buying stolen servers from Twitter.
I didn’t see anyone steal this server
That reads like something out of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Zaphod Beeblebrox, because of “an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine”, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather are actually his direct descendants.
Musk must have been the offspring of an unspeakable accident between Zaphod and one of those Sacramento racks.
That reads like something out of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I was thinking an episode of Silicon Valley but yeah, Hitchhiker’s Guide fits too…
I really dislike Musk, but I find it hard to criticize this when it generally worked.
The platform formerly known as Twitter is still running, and there’s no more $100 million/year data center.
6-9 months would have meant $50-75 million dollars. I don’t know what the outages and re-engineering ended up costing them, but that’s a ton of money.
Looks like you’re the type the writer talks about at the end:
There’s something to be said for pushing back on needless rules and bureaucracy, but it helps if you actually understand stuff before doing so, rather than doing something like this that had half a dozen ways it could have ended in serious disaster and possible tragedy. The fact that it “only” resulted in Twitter falling over every few weeks for months likely means that Musk and his supporters got the very wrong lesson out of this.
What risks, exactly? Twitter goes down? Proprietary Twitter data gets stolen in some server heist scenario?
The servers were not actually secured in the truck properly, so another scenario would have been the damage and destruction of some or all of them.
Plus, yes, theft. And it’s not just proprietary data, it was also personal and financial data for users and advertisers.
I imagine thousands of pounds of unsecured load would be potentially dangerous for the driver and all other drivers on the road too.
First of all, Musk burdened twitter with a level of debt that cost (last estimate that I saw) $1B/year to service. This data center would not have been a problem if he had actually been a good businessman and, you know, didn’t massively overpay with a debt-funded takeover while waiving due diligence on a company he didn’t want in a market he completely doesn’t understand. He set fire to $44B. Twitter’s current valuation has been estimated to be as low as $4B. I personally think that’s low, but the May estimate was $15B (which didn’t include the loss of branding hit).
So his recklessness and complete lack of understanding combined with his overconfidence and incompetence made the $100M savings into peanuts compared to what he destroyed by pulling exactly the same kind of move throughout the business.
Now combine that with the very probable fact that this saved no where near $100M. Shitty shifting of servers breaks hardware. They weren’t prepped to receive them at the destination. They ended up with major drops in service, including Elmo having to shut twitter down for a weekend because they couldn’t handle the traffic. Now he’s whining about “scraping” and trying to squeeze blood from a stone in the face of advertisers abandoning him.
This in no way generally worked. Things are absolutely falling apart around their ears. I’ve stopped even trying to follow twitter links because they work less than half the time since I don’t have an account.
Elon is Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss with a lot of money and a PR firm.
Dilbert’s boss is lazy, Musk is full of passionate intensity.
My first gig out of college in the Valley was working with (later for) a relatively charismatic “I know better” untreated bipolar guy. This dude actually had the chops, he was actually smarter than you. His demos and product ideas were amazing, legit visionary. Inspirational.
But gods it was soul-destroying to try to work for the guy, he kept pulling exactly this kind of “it’s not that complicated!” stunt, changing plans on a whim, editing history to make himself consistent, hair-trigger switching between praise and abuse…
It got a lot of good work out of me, I learned a lot, I was well-compensated, but I now that I know the signs I’m never working for a person like that again.
(see also: the subject of another fawning Isaacson hagiography, Steve Jobs)
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The problem is risk. A lot of the bureaucracy that exists for any company is risk mitigation. The wiping of servers, or using suction cups, or any of that is a security against a large dollar amount to spend if something goes wrong. But that’s just the cost of security, it’s worthless if it isn’t tested. If a locked door isn’t rattled or deter someone, it might as well have been unlocked.
He took a gamble and the doors were not rattled and everything worked. The thing to criticize here is really the carelessness. What if one of those servers got out and somebody stole all of that data? What if while under those floorboards he got damaged, or something related did? And it’s not just these two questions, there’s stuff in that article that probably wasn’t covered that we can question.
There may be things that are not in the book that we can question, and that is the problem with Elon. He needs a string of bad luck to show how truly dangerous he is.
No, they were just extremely lucky that nothing worse than twitter going down happened. There’s a reason protocols exist for data center moves. The infrastructure manager told Elon that the destination DC in Oregon had different rack and power setups and you just can’t plug and play a server you pulled out of Sacramento. Elon also went under the floorboards and disconnected the power cables and seismic detectors which could’ve caused electrocution, fire, earthquake false alarms, or compromising the detection system itself. Then they were moving equipment that weighed more than what the floor was rated for, which could’ve caused cave-ins or compromising the structural integrity of the floor. Not to mention the possible damage to the equipment by moving them the same way you’d move a couch. They also hired some random cheap moving company they found on yelp to move the servers because they charged 90% less than the existing contractor. No contracts and paid in cash.
Tons of things could’ve gone wrong. Just because downtime was the worst that happened, doesn’t mean it’s ok to do. It is also those same data center protocols that help prevent idiots like Musk from causing catastrophic issues when they pull off stunts like this.
That’s like saying why wear PPE and follow safety protocols on a construction site, it’ll save us money if we don’t do any of that. Nobody died or got hurt? Perfect.
There’s a reason things need to be done a certain way, if something had gone wrong what would’ve been the consequences? What if all those data racks full of personal user information were just straight up stolen by the random movers they hired off the street?? What if the floor had collapsed under the weight of the servers being moved, tipped the server over and crushed someone? Just because things worked out relatively fine doesn’t mean no harm no foul.
Musk is an idiot. Deciding to do things his way to save money and time reflects poorly on all his other companies.
Are the severs running SSDs or hard disks?
I remember the story of the guy moving a shopping cart full of his company’s HDs across the street or something and destroying them all just rattling the fucking cart across the shitty surface.
What a fucking moron. This is the guy whose self-driving car you trust?
Nope. Once upon a time long ago I thought I wanted a Tesla. Now? I’d rather drive a Ford Focus.
I feel personally attacked here.
Well, I drive a Kia Soul, so I’m probably not one to be throwing stones.
I’d rather drive a Ford pinto.
Ah man, I love the Ford [Dick in Portuguese]
I’d rather drive an old lada made out of depleted uranium than a Tesla.
I’d rather ride a bike
For real. I love those ugly things.
Luckily, he’s not the one making them!
Nope, just the CEO of the company that has regularly overridden the decisions of his engineers, driving anyone with any actual experience away.
Autonomous vehicles built by hundreds of first-year software engineering graduates seems like a good idea though.
But but, it makes fart sounds!! /s
…what?
Teslas have an “Emissions Testing Mode” on the centre console that’s just a fart sound generator.
OMG OK that’s it. Tesla cars are now out of the question for me and if I ever get the chance to ride on a SpaceX ship (not very likely) I think I’d decline. Totally different companies ofc but the same master “mind” behind.
This guy represents everything that you do not want to see in a CEO.
NO THANK YOU
Stockton Rush was an orphan in comparison
It really seems like SpaceX worked for real. They now have the best safety record for any booster and most of the world’s space traffic. What’s their reusability record now, is it 16 flights on one rocket? You can’t argue with that result.
I don’t know what he did to get to the point of “fail fast” during development but they put their money where their mouth is. Multiple catastrophic test failures that would have been career ending anywhere else, seemingly weren’t, and they appeared to have a very fast (for rocketry) and very successful program
SpaceX is now old space. They are the launch capacity of the USA. It’s ridiculous actually
From what I understand, SpaceX made real effort to split the company into two operations. One uses the reliable Falcon 9 system launching from Cape Canaveral (and other established launch facilities) to put satellites and astronauts into space. The other operation is Elon Musk’s playground in Boca Chica where he tries to build the biggest spaceship ever!
Don’t get me wrong, there are some good engineers working at the Boca Chica operation, I’ve heard the Raptor engine is really good and there’s probably some other things they’ve made there that will be useful for rocketry in general. And who knows, the really smart people may get the biggest rocket ever to actually work someday despite Musk’s stupidity.
Does anyone care anymore ?
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I do. I don’t care about twitter itself but this slow moving train wreck is still fun to watch.
He is one of the richest people in the world.
The more news about billionaires like this pop up, the easier it will be to argue that maaaaaaaybe we shouldn’t be giving them that much power in society.
This just makes him more famous and more powerful.
I don’t know, I think ridicule is the most powerful weapon against billionaires, and all these articles do is create and spread more ridicule. There comes a point where bad advertisement is just bad advertisement.
No it doesn’t. His would that even work? Please explain
How much more powerful can he be? He’d be more powerful if he was more subtle about stuff and people weren’t ready to fight against him.
It’s much better to effectively use him as an argument for why billionaires shouldn’t exist. Fuel for the fire of change.
One day, one of these stunts he pulls is going to end up ruining whatever company he does it in, and I’m all here for it. Though we’ll probably never know since he’ll just blame it on something / someone else and his little muskettes will follow along.
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Hey now, you might be on to something here…
Shhh… don’t tell him how this year went. It’ll ruin the story.
It’s not one day. It’s happening in the headlines as we watch. Some estimates are that twitter has lost 90% of its value in the (a bit under a full) year since Elmo took over. Post-rebranding, some financial institutions and even one of Musk’s own dumb-ass shoot from the hip tweets puts twitter’s current value at around $4-5B.
Even if that’s low, I think the best case estimate, before rebranding, was sitting around $15B. That’s still a loss of 2/3 value in less than a year (that was in May) and it hasn’t gotten better since the attempted rebrand.
It’s happening, and his incompetence is on full display. He’s even reached the stage of megalomania where he’s blaming the Jews.
No, Elmos own estimates are that it lost 90% of its value, probably lost a lot more.
That’s company’s name? Twitter.
*X
Fucking Apple autocorrected me lol
Even Apple does not agree with their shitty new name. 😄
I respect it enough to call it Xitter. Pronunciation is up to your imagination.
Looks like he is literally asking for trouble with decisions like that. It’s just a matter of time until he manages to cause a major disaster.
Honestly, outrage-bait / circlejerk articles like these is why I stopped using twitter and reddit to begin with. Hur dur, Elon bad, upvotes please. I don’t disagree - I just don’t want to see this kind of low-effort posts, which OP seems to excel at. Time for a mute.
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The article is honestly really interesting for the details it gives. It’s easy enough to dismiss anything as clickbait, but sometimes it just sounds like that old tired “Trump Derangement Syndrome” BS.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s clickbait, but personally I’m not that interested in a retelling of how he started gutting twitter shortly after he bought it last year. Maybe it’s not this article per se, just the straw of musk spam that broke the camels back.
And you brought me into this why? You decided you needed to make that little swipe at me why, exactly?
“Don’t get me wrong”
Then say different words that mean different things…
Honestly, outrage-bait / circlejerk articles like these . . . I just don’t want to see this kind of low-effort posts, which OP seems to excel at. . . .
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s clickbait . . .
Your words, my emphasis.
Thanks for emphasising I never called the article clickbait, just outrage-bait, circlejerk and low effort. And I do still think posting it here is just that.
Outrage-bait is clickbait. More specifically, it’s a subset of clickbait.
Wikipedia:
Ragebait, rage-bait, rage baiting, and outrage baiting are similar Internet slang neologisms referring to manipulative tactics that feed on readers’ anxieties and fears. They are all forms of clickbait. . . . The term rage bait, which has been cited since at least 2009, is a negative form of click-baiting as it relies on manipulating users to respond in kind to offensive, inflammatory “headlines”, memes, tropes, or comments.
My bad. I thought clickbait just referred to headlines that don’t deliver. Today I learned.
This one isn’t click bait. It’s not about him saying something dumb, it’s about something really dumb he did and in depth. If any other CEO did what this article outlines it would still be worth reading after getting some popcorn ready.
For all the people complaining that “Elon news are not tech”, this one does go into relevant technical details of the matter.
Which is precisely why I posted it - because it went into the details of he did.
I love this. I’m a former IT engineer/CTO turned renegade entrepreneur, so this story tickles both of my feet.
Yeah, any reasonable person would know this idea to move the servers without a plan was ridiculous.
Yet as a roll-up-the-sleeves entrepreneur your entire job is to fucking destroy the red tape that is put up in front of you constantly. Or else you and everyone who works for you is out of a job. Of course there will be problems, but that’s why you have smart people who can sort it out afterwards faster than they can preplan for it.
And a lot of really smart people make “doing it the right way” a religion, so when the cash is going to run out shortly, well, sometimes the big guy needs to just roll the dice.
I really hope someone will just push musk out a window. He’s so incredibly stupid he doesn’t deserve his money or power.
Don’t worry, he’ll upset Putin soon enough.
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A fractal Rube Goldberg machine
Welcome to software engineering Elon.
Hahahaha, absolutely in character for that fucking moron
