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…
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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