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…
This article is fucking hilarious top to bottom and if you came here to comment without reading, I highly suggest you read it.
Absolutely worth the time.
Pocket-knife-prying-open-floorboards crazy. Biggest asshole I’ve ever read about crazy.
Jesus, I thought you were just using that as a figure of speech so that we could all understand that Space Daddy Musk was exhibiting meth-head-like tendencies, but no, he literally diverted a flight from Austin to Sac at the suggestion of his cousin, drove in a Corolla to the data center (edit: at 2 in the morning on Dec 24), and used his pocket knife to pry up the floorboards.
Fuck, how much cocaine has he been doing? He’s about to hit John McAfee levels of bad decision making.
Also, Elon, I was just kidding about the “Space Daddy” stuff. If you want to send a few pounds of blow my way, HMU.
Do you really want to ask anything out of someone who diverts a flight and drives to a random data center at 2 am on Dec 24 to take it apart with a pocket knife?
I mean, I’ve gotten drugs from sketchier people. And if we’re talking about stimulants, that’s almost an advertising point. “So good, it got Elon pulling up floorboards and crashing servers!” is a decent testament to how strong it is.
Plus, if this was a serious conversation, the first thing I would do would be to test for purity and contaminants. Test kits are relatively cheap, and even if you’re open to getting baby powder spiked with bath salts in place of cocaine, it’s better to know what you’re getting into. Test your drugs, people!
Some poor engineers getting paged late at night:
“WTF?! Why does the servers shutting down one after another? Do we have a rodent on the loose in Sacramento?”
*Check CCTV*
“What is that thing crawling under the floorboard?”
It was a Muskrat, very damaging to your companies infrastructure. Some even deem them a plague.
“Rodents. Release the halon gas.”
“Wait no, thats Elon Musk!”
“…”
“Release the gas.”
It’s the corolla bit that makes this. I don’t know why, but he needed to list the detail of the car and that had to eat Musk up a little bit.
just imagine the face of “Alex the Uzbek” while he is watching the manChild pry open the floorboards, knowing that he should stop the maniac and calculating that he shouldn’t stop the second richest man in the world 🤣
Alex didn’t want to go back to Uzbekistan, or be threatened with it regardless of citizenship by ol’ tusky Musk.
Yeah, there were many rumours that Musk’s actions have caused waves and waves of people to quit Twitter or do something they know will get them fired. The majority of the ones who are left are the ones on H-1B programs who get kicked out of the country if they lose their job and can’t find a new one within something like a month.
Très cool comme pseudo :p
;)
Good article. Nobody else would get away with being this risk taking and careless, and the only reason he does get away wirh it is because he is the boss.
Money is one hell of a drug.
You were right, I wasn’t gonna read it because I knew he was an idiot but the article is hilarious and everyone should read it.
Techdirt is the shit tbh
“What I wasn’t told was that we had 70,000 hard-coded references to Sacramento. And there’s still shit that’s broken because of it.”” Im pretty sure he was told but was either not really listening or comprehending.
Yeah “I wasn’t told” is really “I wasn’t listening” in narcissist language.
“I wasn’t notified in triplicate, in writing, with the relevant sections underlined and requiring my signature for acknowledgment”
Even that wouldn’t stop a stubborn narcissist.
Well, no, but it’s good to have such documentation for legal reasons when said narcissist loses their shit and attempts to scapegoat you
“I wasn’t notified in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters”.
Spot on
I’m sure he was told… But brain exploding emoji
The manager began to explain in detail some of the obstacles to relocating the servers to Portland. “It has different rack densities, different power densities,” she said. “So the rooms need to be upgraded.” She started to give a lot more details, but after a minute, Musk interrupted. “This is making my brain hurt,” he said. “I’m sorry, that was not my intention,” she replied in a measured monotone. “Do you know the head-explosion emoji?” he asked her. “That’s what my head feels like right now. What a pile of f—ing bulls—. Jesus H f—ing Christ. Portland obviously has tons of room. It’s trivial to move servers one place to another.”
Sounds like he did his best to make sure no one could tell him
She
Well, there’s your first problem. Musk doesn’t give a shit about what women think. The man is an S tier misogynist. He probably zoned out listening to this woman and wondered how many horses it would cost to get a handy out of her.
or he just didnt bother asking anyone before he started
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’d rather drive a Ford pinto.
For real. I love those ugly things.
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
I feel personally attacked here.
Well, I drive a Kia Soul, so I’m probably not one to be throwing stones.
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.
Hs still impacts critical decisions. He needs to be kept very far away from money and business.
I’m shocked that the data center required retinal scans but that the employee with access could then just hold the door and let him and others in.
I used to work at a data center with lots of security. To get into the area with the servers you had to go through a man trap. It was a room a little larger than a telephone booth with automatic doors on both sides. To open the first door you needed a physical card key. Once inside the door closed, then to open the inner door you needed to both enter a PIN and have your hand scanned in a biometric scanner. Only after all that could you get inside. The booth also weighed you, and if your weight was off by a certain amount after your last pass through then it wouldn’t let you in. That was to prevent somebody from piggybacking with you.
lmao mental image of Daniel Craig riding someone piggyback in a tuxedo and holding a silenced pistol
Prop yourself from wall to wall so your weight doesn’t count.
Spiderman be stealing yo bits.
It’ll only work if you use three Bonds’ in a trench coat!
How do you get big equipments (e.g.a pallet of server components, or a whole rack of new servers) into the area?
Separate double bay doors. They have a pair for each floor that opens to an outside wall. You use a forklift to get the pallets up. That or there is a big ass freight elevator, depending on the data center.
So it’s basically this setup https://youtu.be/cP4d74Qk3ac?si=Fq_I12sU4uIAgm7w
likely admin override right? i think as a lowly employee this is what he had to do
There was third party security at this particular facility. You had to show your ID, have them confirm you’re authorized to bring equipment in, then they’d bring it through a locked freight door for you.
Oh, god, so that little death hallway to the red queen in resident evil was ACCURATE
Even the smaller data center I used to go to would have an alarm go off if the door was open for more than a few seconds. The first door opened with your hand being scanned and the cage to our racks could be opened with a key card.
How did they get racks in there? Or like big blade servers?
I’m sure there were other, larger, entry points that could be opened for moving equipment in and out. They would then be locked down during normal operation.
That’s pretty cool, sounds like some MacGyver shit!
The booth also weighed you, and if your weight was off by a certain amount after your last pass through then it wouldn’t let you in.
Fatphobic security smh.
My understanding is you can be as heavy as you want, you just can’t gain more than 20kg in a week
Is that a challenge?
- Niko Avocado
This is the same guy who wants to put implants into people’s brains and send them to Mars. Let that sink in.
Yeah, I literally just sent this article to my partner with the commentary “…and this is why I no longer think we should ever buy a Tesla”
I don’t want this egomaniac in charge of anything that has real-world safety implications for me and mine.
“Look, just hand me scalpel and I’ll do it.”
“look, just go to home Depot and get a carpet knife for 1/10th of the cost!”
You think Twitter is made of money?!? Grab some plastic cutlery from the cafeteria.
Lmao, Musk is the new Gary Young, the supplment king. Behind the Bastards did an episode on him, he really wanted to be a surgeon without that pesky medical license requirement.
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/behind-the-bastards/part-one-gary-young-the-fake-LlhDs_-FESt/
I am all for billionaires wanting go to Mars. They will just be on their own, getting back. Oopise daisy, the rocket only had enough fuel go to Mars and not back. If they want to come back, well they all that wealth to pay us and we’ll get them, one day…soon…eventually…maybe…probably not.
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Or a “submarine”
over like … a weekend
Sounds like a good weekend then.
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If you’re cold, they’re cold. Let those sinks in!
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.
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)
But that would make him cool somehow.
Then think of him like OJ Simpson and Charlie. Problem solved.
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.
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
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.
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.
Hey now, you might be on to something here…
Shhh… don’t tell him how this year went. It’ll ruin the story.
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.
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It’s a total lack of the concept of scale. I’ve moved servers like this, but when decommissioning them. Things are different when running a corporate data center than when moving a home lab. He doesn’t grasp the difference, because he doesn’t understand the scale.
Running and moving one computer is different from 150k of them. Hooking them back up the the network without a plan or documentation must have been a challenge.
I love how a data center is not considered reliable unless it has something like 99.9% uptime. It was costing him so much for a damn good reason.
And yet this idiot decided to start unplugging servers by himself at 2 in the morning.
Did he not realize that he’d have to pay the DC company for at least the quarter, regardless of if the servers are physically there or not? It’s not like you pay these places by the hour. They’re payed for by months or years, and there’s contracts involved.
He still had to pay the bill, I guarantee it. He also just wasted thousands of dollars paying random people from the street to move multi-million dollar servers, and opened himself up to millions of dollars in liability if any sensitive information was lost or stolen during this stunt.
Why do people give this man money again?
i mean, he may very well not have paid. this is the guy who refused to pay rent on headquarters, and two different people quit/were fired because they wouldn’t just… not pay rent on his orders.
has he paid rent since? as far as i can tell, he just gets away with this shit. edit - looks like an eviction notice was issued this summer, so i’m guess he still hasn’t paid.
If I miss my rent, it would take days for me to be fucked. How do the wealthy assholes of the world get away with this?
Shit, if I missed my rent by a day, my old landlord would have an eviction notice on my door by 6AM the next morning.
They have been evicted out of several offices for nonpayment.
“What do you mean “challenge”, just do it” -Elon probably
“Just plug them in, Jesus fucking Christ.”
Whelp, this is just one of the reasons why Twitter employees sleep in their office.
You never know when your coked up employer might barge through the door.
Elon seems like the type of guy that would barge into someone’s office when they’re working unpaid overtime, offer them a line of coke, and then fire them for using drugs on the job if they accept (and take the cost of the line out of their last paycheck).
And if they don’t accept… “You think you’re better than me?!? You’re not better than me! You’re fired!”
Then snort the line after they walk out, followed by a short exclamation like “what an asshole that guy is.”
With servers or a sink.
Elon Musk is a privileged manchild who never grew out of his teenager phase, throwing around his inherited wealth like the kid from Blank Check and throwing temper tantrums anytime someone calls him out on his bullshit. Any claims to success he may have had been entirely in spite of him, not because of him. He doesn’t have any fucking idea what he’s doing and if any one of you or I failed even a fraction as much as Musk had, we’d have all been fired ten times over.
Sounds a lot like another conservative figurehead I could name…
Actually, it sounds a lot like almost all conservative figureheads in US politics.
They’re completely idiotic and yet way more successful than I’ll ever be. But then again I have a guilty conscience.
They’re “successful” if you define success as being born into wealth and/or being willing to ignore the suffering of others. For you and me (and most right thinking people), that’s no real measure of success. Unfortunately, capitalism and the US political systems gives power to the people least suited to wielding it.
And that’s why their base votes for them. Because they can relate.
That is an insult to teenagers
So glad I ended up not working at Tesla
His most valuable lieutenants at Tesla and SpaceX had learned ways to deflect his bad ideas and drip-feed him unwelcome information, but the legacy employees at X didn’t know how to handle him.
This is fucking insane and would drive me nuts.
This guy really is a Space Karen
The CEO then told him that some of the floors could not handle more than 500 pounds of pressure, so rolling a 2,000-pound server would cause damage. Musk replied that the servers had four wheels, so the pressure at any one point was only 500 pounds. “The dude is not very good at math,” Musk told the musketeers.
This guy is considered to be a genius? This guy is a fucking billionaire?
I’m dead.
As a non-physicist, what is the technical reason Elon was wrong? I assume that when the CEO said 500 pounds, they meant 500 pounds of force relative to some surface area of the floor? I’m guessing that surface area was significantly larger than one wheel on the rack, so the combined force of all 4 wheels was still well over the limit. Maybe someone who knows physics could explain better.
Let’s say you weigh 200 lbs. When you stand on a scale with two feet, that’s 200lbs ÷ 2 feet. So the scale reads 100 lbs, right? Of course not. Increasing the number of touch points doesn’t reduce the mass.
Now what if you stand on two scales side by side, one foot on each? Then they’ll each read 100lbs. The load is distributed across the touch points, but the total mass when you add them back up remains the same.
So what does that mean for ol muskaroo? It’s hard to say who’s correct without knowing more about the floor. If it’s server tiles that are hollow underneath and each tile can hold 500lbs individually, maybe it’s ok if the cart was large enough that two wheels would never be on the same tile.
But the bottom line is that when the guy that runs the server room says not to do it, you don’t fucking do it. Have a little respect. Sure, Musk is the owner so it’s kind of technically his server room, but he’s being a prick regardless.
Musk is the owner so it’s kind of technically his server room, but he’s being a prick regardless.
I think he was renting the space, so he doesn’t own the server room, just the servers in it.
I don’t know physics too well, but I’ll try to explain.
First of all, look out for pressure. Slamming your hand on a desk(lots of surface area) may not hurt much, but doing the same thing on a thumb tack(very low surface area) will suck, even though it’s the same amount of force. Pressure is just force/area (I’m probably oversimplifying).
So not only is there still 2000 pounds of force on the floor, it’s all concentrated on one(well, four) areas. Meaning that there’s a high chance the floor will break under those wheels. You’d actually have better luck just sliding the server across the floor.
Elons logic is also just stupid here. An elevator can’t lift a 1,000 pound box, but can it lift four 250 pound boxes? No! Even a child could answer that. The fact that he just assumed that adding four wheels magically distributed the weight is stupid. What if you had five wheels? Eleven? It’s not rocket science (which is quite ironic, given the company he owns).
So yeah. I’ve got no idea how he’s a billionaire. No fucking clue.
The simple reason is that it depends on what in the floor can’t actually handle the 2000 lbs. If it’s a floor 1’x1’ floor tile that will break, then Elon is right. If the loade limit is a beam that spans a larger distance, then he’s totally wrong.
In places like a server room, you typically have a raised floor that supports tiles in the neighborhood of 1.5’-3 feet square. (The raised floor allows for all the cabling and air con to be run around the systems.) If you say that the floor can’t support more than 2000lbs that typically means they can’t guarantee enough of a safety margin and you run the risk of the object breaking through the floor. Musk’s wheel argument is crap unless he can be sure each wheel is not on the same floor support area. (Which obviously he can’t.)
However floors the spec will typically have some safety margin and that probably kept him from going through the floor. His logic, while not 100% wrong in the basic statement, lacked a deeper understanding of what was going on and certainly doesn’t help the idea that he’s a Tony Stark genius. It was a Dunning-Kruger level dumb statement to make.
If this statement was made in isolation I would give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he realized it was a stupid statement once he said it but he just didn’t bother to correct himself. However he’s made so many dumb and arrogant statements over the past few years, I assume it was just a dumb unsophisticated statement from someone who isn’t that bright.
Funny thing is this kind of behaviour isn’t unique to Musk. A lot of entrepreneurs and CEOs seem to have similar kind of attitude. They want everything done cheaper faster and there’s no 2 ways about it. It’s their way or highway. If shit goes to hell it’s other people’s heads that roll.
It’s frustrating they don’t even know what to be angry about. Like instead of flying to Sacramento and ripping out 5000 servers why not flip out that the code has 70,000 different hard coded references to a single data center instead of one.
He did not know that at the time because his poor little brain started hurting.
This is exactly why our last governor here in Illinois, didn’t CEO Governor Rauner, was probably the most ineffectual governor of our state ever had. He literally had no capacity for compromise, and was a Republican, in an Illinois where the legislature has long been solidly Democrat. I can’t think of a single thing he actually got done. All because he was a CEO trying to run Illinois like a business.
I do not recommend working in Compliance then either lol!
Yeah, that’s basically why I got out of IT. Too many managers/clients refusing to listen to warnings about what would happen when they did X, then blaming the techies when things went to shit.
Because they are the “boss”, they have 0 accountability. Worst case for them is a golden handshake, and failing upwards where the cycle starts again.
I do not think it is a coincidence that Tesla has recently released the updated Model 3 to some decently positive reviews. I think that is in no small part to Musk being so distracted by Twitter that he hasn’t been able to fuck up things over at Tesla in a while.
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
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
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.
SpaceX is now old space. They are the launch capacity of the USA. It’s ridiculous actually
Stockton Rush was an orphan in comparison
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
