this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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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…

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[–] SCB@lemmy.world 304 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe@lemmy.world 123 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Pocket-knife-prying-open-floorboards crazy. Biggest asshole I've ever read about crazy.

[–] NielsBohron@lemmy.world 131 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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 33 points 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!

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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?"

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[–] merde@sh.itjust.works 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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 🤣

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[–] HubertManne@kbin.social 175 points 1 year ago (5 children)

"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.

[–] Toribor@corndog.social 127 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Yeah "I wasn't told" is really "I wasn't listening" in narcissist language.

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[–] breakingcups@lemmy.world 171 points 1 year ago (7 children)

What a fucking moron. This is the guy whose self-driving car you trust?

[–] demlet@lemmy.world 66 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Nope. Once upon a time long ago I thought I wanted a Tesla. Now? I'd rather drive a Ford Focus.

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[–] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 163 points 1 year ago (14 children)

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.

[–] Tangent5280@lemmy.world 69 points 1 year ago (3 children)

lmao mental image of Daniel Craig riding someone piggyback in a tuxedo and holding a silenced pistol

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[–] CitizenKong@lemmy.world 144 points 1 year ago (9 children)

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

[–] NielsBohron@lemmy.world 60 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 48 points 1 year ago (3 children)

"Look, just hand me scalpel and I'll do it."

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[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 113 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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?

[–] prole@sh.itjust.works 77 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] designatedhacker@lemm.ee 50 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Kolrami@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 51 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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"

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[–] Silinde@lemmy.world 105 points 1 year ago (10 children)

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 57 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] atempuser23@lemmy.world 95 points 1 year ago (13 children)

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.

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[–] StarServal@kbin.social 85 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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 32 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Sounds a lot like another conservative figurehead I could name...

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

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[–] malloc@lemmy.world 80 points 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 75 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] RandAlThor@lemmy.ca 65 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] Hazdaz@lemmy.world 60 points 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.

[–] MaxPower@feddit.de 59 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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

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[–] SlopppyEngineer@discuss.tchncs.de 56 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Sordid@lemmy.dbzer0.com 54 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

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[–] doublejay1999@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Does anyone care anymore ?

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[–] ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 40 points 1 year ago

One of the richest people in the world, everyone.

[–] arc@lemm.ee 39 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] keeb420@kbin.social 36 points 1 year ago (3 children)

They were somewhere over Las Vegas when James made his suggestion that they were in batshitcrazy country.

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[–] spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

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