Elon Musk Frantically Moved Twitter Servers Himself, Eventually Realized His Mistake

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is a hands-on guy, which has sometimes led to incidents that backfire spectacularly — sometimes on an international scale.

Now we can an add personally unplugging and hauling server infrastructure for his newly-acquired social network Twitter to the list, in yet another anecdote that forcefully illustrates both Musk's wildly unconventional management style and, ultimately, his flair for extraordinary and sometimes self-destructive hubris.

The juicy server tidbit was revealed in a new excerpt posted by CNBC News from Walter Isaacson's hotly-anticipated new Musk biography. Back in December of last year, according to Isaacson, Musk became impatient with the leadership at Twitter when they explained to him that it would take careful planning and time to move more than 700 servers from Sacramento, California to a much cheaper facility in Portland, Oregon.

Instead of waiting for an orderly process to be put together, though, Musk decided to hastily move the servers with a motley crew consisting of himself, his cousins, a smattering of Tesla and SpaceX staff, and a moving company whose staff wanted to be paid in cash.

Musk was so impatient that at one point he shimmied himself under a server floor and used a pen knife to open up an electrical cabinet in order to unplug the server.

"Well that doesn’t seem super hard," Musk said, according to Isaacson.

They managed to move the servers in three days, but their methods were extremely unorthodox. They didn't wipe the equipment of personal data before the move nor did they swaddle the servers in protection, horrifying facility workers.

"For the next two months, X was destabilized," Isaacson wrote.

In the end, even Musk admitted that the disorderly schlep had been a bad idea.

"In retrospect, the whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake," Musk told Isaacson. "I was told we had redundancy across our data centers. 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."

Isaacson even linked the chaotic move to various technical problems that plagued the site — which Musk later renamed X — including Florida politician Ron DeSantis's super glitchy campaign announcement on Twitter Spaces.

Say what you will about Issacson's book, but it's making news. Other Muskworld news it's broken: that Musk has a secret third child with the musician Grimes named Techno Mechanicus, and that he closed his eyes and took his hands off the steering wheel of a Tesla while on a date with Grimes in order to demonstrate the car's advanced driving system called Autopilot.

Will more revelations come out? Well, the week is still young.

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