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…

  • SCB@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • NielsBohron@lemmy.world
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        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.

        • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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?

          • NielsBohron@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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!

        • OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • merde alors@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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 🤣

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            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.

    • no banana@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • HubertManne@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    “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.

    • Infernal_pizza@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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

      • HighElfMage@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • CitizenKong@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is the same guy who wants to put implants into people’s brains and send them to Mars. Let that sink in.

  • Silinde@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        No, Elmos own estimates are that it lost 90% of its value, probably lost a lot more.

    • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • atempuser23@lemmy.world
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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.

    • Zron@lemmy.world
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      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?

      • braxy29@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

          • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

        • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          They have been evicted out of several offices for nonpayment.

  • StarServal@kbin.social
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    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.

    • NielsBohron@lemmy.world
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      Sounds a lot like another conservative figurehead I could name…

      Actually, it sounds a lot like almost all conservative figureheads in US politics.

      • Delusional@lemmy.world
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        They’re completely idiotic and yet way more successful than I’ll ever be. But then again I have a guilty conscience.

        • NielsBohron@lemmy.world
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          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.

  • malloc@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

  • dukk@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
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      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.

      • AstridWipenaugh@lemmy.world
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        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.

        • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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          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.

      • dukk@programming.dev
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        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.

      • blady_blah@lemmy.world
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        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.

  • RandAlThor@lemmy.ca
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    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.

    • Etterra@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • SlopppyEngineer@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    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

    • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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      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.

  • Hazdaz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Sordid@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Note the pattern: a willingness to ignore the details of what could go wrong, YOLO it and just test it out, and the assumption that if nothing goes wrong when you do that, it means that everything is fine and nothing else could possibly go wrong.

    Did anyone else reading this bit immediately think of that other rich idiot that died in his ridiculous submarine?