Elon Musk thought that Apple’s tracker was going to help him in an impossible mission!
With many of his actions, Elon Musk has ensured that his name and his eccentricity are synonymous. And this can involve more than we imagine. In the authorized biography written by Walter Isaacsona story was revealed that Musk purchased the entire AirTag inventory from an Apple Store. Proposal? Perhaps few people would have thought of it.
The CEO of Tesla and current owner of thought the Apple device would be used to track the movement of Twitter serversas the company was then called, from Sacramento to Oregon.
Elon Musk trusted Apple’s AirTag for an “urgent” mission
The extract from the biography of Isaacson describes in detail the situation that generated the purchase of AirTags.
“It was late at night on December 22, and the meeting before in Musk’s conference room on the 10th floor, and certainly not when I was in a bad mood.”
“…One of X’s server farms, located in Sacramento, had agreed to grant them some short-term extensions in their lease so that they can begin moving in during 2023 in an orderly manner. “But this morning,” the nervous manager told Musk, “They came back to us and said this plan is no longer on the table because, and these are their words, they don’t believe we are financially viable.” “.
The installation cost X more than $100 million a year.. Musk wanted to save this money by moving the servers to one of X’s other facilities, in Portland, Oregon. Another official at the meeting said it could not be done right away.
The AirTag is a great device if used as Apple suggests
Faced with the problem, Musk ordered the servers to be moved from Oregon to Portland in less than 30 days. But after hours and Talking with two trusted members of his team, he decided they would make the transfer.
“The next day, Christmas Eve, Musk called for reinforcements. Ross Nordeen, who worked with his friend James at Tesla, drove from San Francisco. He stopped at the Apple Store in Union Square and spent $2,000 to repurchase the entire stock of AirTags so he could follow the servers during his trip.then stopped at Home Depot, where he spent $2,500 on wrenches, bolt cutters, headlights and tools needed to unscrew seismic bolts.
After several days and a budget less than the millions that started the discussion, the servers have moved their destination. Of course, this was a disorganized and insecure process.
By reading the fine print of the AirTag’s features, Musk would have saved this expense. But making his insistent personality famous, he simply preferred to transpose his idea into the real world. So, while fulfilling the order, its team of technicians confirmed that Only 16 AirTags can be paired with a single iPhone at a time and instead of a successful mission, they gave the “boss” a report with bad news.
According to another excerpt published in Isaacson’s book, This urgent decision had harmful consequences for Musk:
Elon Musk admitted one of his biggest mistakes as leader of X
“For the next two months, X was destabilized. The lack of servers caused crises, even when Musk hosted a Twitter Spaces for presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. “In retrospect, the complete shutdown of Sacramento was a mistake.”, Musk admitted in March 2023. “They told me we have redundancy in our data centers. What they didn’t tell me was that we had 70,000 coded referrals in Sacramento. And there are still things that are broken because of that. »
