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…
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…
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.
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 🤣
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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 is why I wouldn't trust a thing that comes out of his mouth. He lies, he says really stupid shit and then he gives people an ultimatum to turn his stupid shit into reality or get fired. Safety, security and reality be damned. If you've ever wondered why people end up dying in fiery crashes because of "autopilot", or "full self drive", this is why.
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.
"Elon musk is a drooling socialist cuck who is apparently far too cowardly to meet my challenge of a firm July 4th, 2024 launch date for his personal mission to mars. Jeff bezos could easily do this if he wasn't too busy actually running the company that he owns."
Mark Beaks from Disney's 2017 Ducktales remake was ahead of its time with regards to asshole Silicon Valley type CEOs, and obviously has a few riffs on Elon Musk as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iPhrnUtQ5U
Ducktales turned out really well. You've got the long-running protagonist Billionaire, Scrooge McDuck and his long-time rival Billionaire Glomgold. However, as a 2017 reimagining, they added the Silicon Valley type Mark Beaks and it was chef's kiss perfect. Old money vs new money is still a relevant subject a hundred-years after the "Gilded Age" of the 1920s / 1930s, that these characters were originally based on.
This needs to be brought up everytime someone claims Elon is purposely sabotaging Twitter. Someone actively sabotaging would not get their hands dirty going in and doing this themselves. These are the actions of the physical embodiment of Dunning-Kruger.
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.
...so you sold your Tesla stock before it was even a public company or sold a single car? Stock that you held for "years" when the company itself was less than a year old?
lol what bullshit. Elon Musk was literally one of the first and biggest investor in the company before they even began designing their first car. That's when he "took over" (and thus got to be named as a founder)
As are any single persons with this much money and, in consequence, power.
It's the old problem with monarchy all over again. Sure, you could get a benevolent leader that favoured the arts, but it was more likely that is was a spoiled inbred who wanted to be famous by starting a few wars with neighbors.
But it’s a problem people keep using Twitter because of what musk has done. Without his antics, using Twitter wouldn’t really be a bad thing, would it?
Every great genius inventor and businessman can be a little eccentric. Remember that before you decide to call them mean names like "abuser", "megalomaniac" etc. It's actually quirky and endearing once you factor in that he's a genius inventor and businessman (I'm also one of the misunderstood people in the same category).
At the risk of sounding like an apologist for this prat, the frustration at being told it will take months to move systems is understandable. Also, the idiot developers who hard-coded the data center location deserve to be fired. Data center floor tiles can be removed easily with a flat blade as a lever instead of using suction cups.
Obviously a coke-fuelled man-child doing it in the middle of the night is ridiculous but if you have unlimited resources you can move any number of servers in a few days, easily. In some ways it's impressive that he was able to pull this off on a whim without a catastrophe (the DeSantis fiasco notwithstanding). It definitely should not have been suggested by a competent data center engineer that it would take months to move anything if the CEO wants it in weeks. Even though he's an ass, I don't blame him for being annoyed about that.
Remember he just gutted Twitter before pulling this stunt, so the estimate of a few months to move the servers might be true if the entire department that handle infra has been gutted with only skeleton crew left.
Well, yes. If nobody left has a clue then it's going to take a little longer but you could physically move just about anything in a few weeks with the right crew, even if you had to bring them in cold. An open checkbook solves a lot of logistical problems.
The proof is more or less self evident. If this idiot and his cousin were able to pull it off without breaking anything critical, then it stands to reason that a properly managed team would have been able to do it in a more orderly way in a few days.
I get that everyone wants to paint this as completely irresponsible, but apart from the fact that it was done so haphazardly in the dead of night and gate crashing the data center security (nobody is going to refuse access to the CEO), there's really nothing here that's completely out of order. Locking the gear in the trucks is pretty standard for intact secure data transport. The real mistake is the infra manager sandbagging the move estimate - or not understanding how to plan and execute it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's Twitter. Who cares if people can't tweet for an hour.
I'm with Elon on this, don't overcomplicate the closing of a data center.
That manager, when asked to do it in 90 days, if s/he was competent should have said: I'll do it, but you'll have to accept a downtime risk.
(But aside from this entertaining story, I do think Elon lost his shine. Wasting $40B on twitter and sabotaging Ukraine while simping for Putin and Trump and not paying taxes... yeah, get rekt Elon).
It's effectively a case of "I left my house unlocked and unarmed while I went on vacation. No one broke in, so I don't see the point in door locks and alarm systems."
Twitter got very VERY lucky that the worst that happened was some outages.
They moved hyper sensitive user data in a moving truck. If anything had gone wrong they would've exposed millions of peoples sensitive data.
You are supposed to wipe the servers before you move them, you shouldn't be driving servers around on the highway while they are still chock full of peoples credit card info and shit.
Edit: you may want to reconsider you being "on the side of musk on this one." From the article:
"
And, of course, it didn’t really “work.” As we detailed, Twitter toppled over a few days later, and this excerpt admits it was because of the “server move.” The article does note that Musk himself eventually said he shouldn’t have done this and it did cause a fair bit of problems for the site, including the disastrous “Twitter Spaces”
"
That manager, when asked to do it in 90 days, if s/he was competent should have said: I'll do it, but you'll have to accept a downtime risk.
That is the correct take in general, but I've worked for managers a bit like Elon before, and that never would have worked. It would have been the equivalent of tendering that resignation, because he sees any pushback at all as insubordination, and not to be tolerated.
The only way out of this is to suggest an alternative course of action, but make it seem like it was his idea all along. My favorite method was to tie it to some bullshit metric he previously set for no reason. "Yes, sir, we could do it right away, but it may have an impact on our ad throughput, and I know ad revenue is a key prioriry you have personally set for the company. If we take the time to transition our ad platform first we can keep our revenue consistent". Then that time ends up identical to the amount of time needed to move things correctly.
It still might not work, but at least you've stroked the Boss's ego, which can keep you employed for a few more months while trying to find the exit ramp.
Musk quite literally said it was equivalent of resigning:
Over the years, Musk had been faced many times with a choice between what he thought was necessary and what others told him was possible. The result was almost always the same. He paused in silence for a few moments, then announced, “You have 90 days to do it. If you can’t make that work, your resignation is accepted.”
Yeah, he is overrated by many. But he's not the typical stupid middle manager, who get brain freeze when presented a simple dilemma.
Fuck, Elon would fail hard as a middle manager. This clock ticks different. I have worked with a lot of people, but I don't think he fits in one of the common types.
I can understand the pushback. Twitter employees work for years to transform a site that went down a lot (remember fail whale?) Into reliable well oiled machinery. Having new owner suddenly tell you to dismantle it all must've been awful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)