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…
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.
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.
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?
has anyone tried to get musk a submarine?
maybe we could crowdfund this
I really hope someone will just push musk out a window. He’s so incredibly stupid he doesn’t deserve his money or power.
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
They were somewhere over Las Vegas when James made his suggestion that they could move them now. It was the type of impulsive, impractical, surge-into-the-breach idea that Musk loved.
Musk and his renegade team were rolling servers out without putting them in crates or swaddling them in protective material, then using store-bought straps to secure them in the truck. “I’ve never loaded a semi before,” James admitted.
The moving contractors that NTT wanted them to use charged $200 an hour. So James went on Yelp and found a company named Extra Care Movers that would do the work at one-tenth the cost.
The servers had user data on them, and James did not initially realize that, for privacy reasons, they were supposed to be wiped clean before being moved. … So James sent someone to Home Depot to buy big padlocks, and they sent the combination codes on a spreadsheet to Portland so the trucks could be opened there. “I can’t believe it worked,” James says.
LMAO who’s this James guy and why does he understand Musk so thoroughly like his own spouse?
Plot twist: Elon and James are the same person. Like in Fight Club.
James is the personality that comes out during particularly extreme manic episodes.
But that would make him cool somehow.
I really dislike Musk, but I find it hard to criticize this when it generally worked.
The platform formerly known as Twitter is still running, and there’s no more $100 million/year data center.
6-9 months would have meant $50-75 million dollars. I don’t know what the outages and re-engineering ended up costing them, but that’s a ton of money.
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
“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.
or he just didnt bother asking anyone before he started
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.
Hey now, you might be on to something here…
Shhh… don’t tell him how this year went. It’ll ruin the story.
Imagine one day, he walks into spacex, board on a rocket, and shoot to mars… just like this!
Maybe someone should trigger him in twitter
The dude is a war criminal
Why is your user tagged as
banned?I posted a funny drawing that had a dick in it and got banned for posting “porn”.
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.
