Musk's Christmas Server Intervention

A story about how Elon Musk personally shut down Twitter's Sacramento servers on Christmas Eve when engineers said it would take 6 months.

"Elon was talking to the Twitter team about cutting costs by shutting down the Sacramento server farm. His engineers said 'It's going to be tricky because those servers are used for all our infrastructure, but we could do it in 6 months.'

Elon said '6 months? What are you talking about? We need to do this faster.' The engineers insisted '6 months - that infrastructure is critical, it's interwoven into everything we do.' Elon: 'I need this done in 6 weeks.' Engineers: 'We can't do this in 6 weeks.' Elon: 'It could be done in 6 days.'

It was Christmas Eve and Elon was flying to Texas with his two cousins. They were brainstorming and someone on the plane had the idea - 'Why don't we just go to Sacramento right now and rip the servers out ourselves?' The idea was if they took the servers offline, they'd have to figure out how to fix it faster than 6 weeks.

Mid-flight, Elon told the pilot to turn around and land in Sacramento. He asked if anyone had a pocket knife, and his bodyguard pulled one out. They went to the server facility, which was closed for Christmas Eve. Elon told them 'Let me in, these are my servers. Open this door right now.' He got in and took down the servers himself."