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.

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.

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.

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.