One doesn’t get to become a trillionaire if you haven’t had your plane take a U-turn to work on something urgent.
Walter Isaacson, who spent two years shadowing Elon Musk for his biography, was in the room when Musk’s impatience with Twitter’s infrastructure team boiled over — and what followed that meeting is one of the more surreal stories to emerge from the early days of the Twitter takeover.
Isaacson recounts sitting in on a meeting between Musk and a team of engineers, about a month after Musk had taken over Twitter. The team was being asked to move servers out of Twitter’s Sacramento data center, and their timeline wasn’t what Musk had in mind:
“The engineer — and I’m sitting there in the meeting and he’s getting really dark, and they don’t know how to deal with him, because this is a month after he took over Twitter, so they don’t know this dude. And they’re saying, ‘Well, no, I’m sorry, Elon, we can’t do it.’ And he’d say, ‘You can do it in six weeks.’ And by the end of the meeting, he said, ‘You can do it in six days.'”
The engineers held their ground. Musk did not.
“He gets really dark, and he decides he’s going to fire them. But it’s December twenty-third, so it’s like two days before Christmas. He does fire them.”
That might have been the end of it — a dramatic firing and a problem left unsolved over the holidays. But then came Christmas Eve.
“The next day, Christmas Eve, he’s flying from San Francisco to Austin, Texas, to go home for Christmas. He’s with two young cousins on the plane who are engineers, and one of them says, ‘Why don’t we just take those servers out ourselves?'”
According to Isaacson’s fuller account, the cousins — James and his brother Andrew — were somewhere over Las Vegas when the idea was floated. It was exactly the kind of impulsive, against-all-logic suggestion that tends to land well with Musk.
“Elon Musk makes a U-turn in his airplane, tells the pilot to go to Sacramento. They were already over Nevada. They land. He rents — there are like four of them on the plane. They rent a truck, a sort of what we call a U-Haul truck, a rental truck, and they go to the server facility, and the guard there is, like, flummoxed. It’s Christmas Eve, and they’re forcing their way in, and they’re looking at the servers, and one of the engineers says…”
What happened next reads more like a heist than a tech infrastructure operation. The only rental vehicle available was a Toyota Corolla. An X staffer named Alex, from Uzbekistan, happened to be at the facility and let them in. The server racks — around 5,200 of them, each weighing roughly 2,500 pounds — were eight feet tall. When Musk looked at them, he reportedly announced, “These things do not look that hard to move.” At one point, he borrowed a security guard’s pocket knife, shimmied under the floor panels, and personally unplugged a server.
By Christmas Eve, Musk had called in reinforcements. One person drove from San Francisco, stopped at an Apple Store to buy out its entire stock of AirTags to track the servers, then swung by a Home Depot and spent $2,500 on wrenches, bolt cutters, and headlamps. A semi truck was arranged. SpaceX staff were brought in. And when the official moving contractor quoted $200 an hour, someone went on Yelp, found a company called Extra Care Movers, and got the work done at a tenth of the price.
The motley crew managed to move four server racks that night, proving the rest could follow within days. “The guys are kicking ass!” Musk reportedly exulted.
But the operation — chaotic, unplanned, and conducted over Christmas — came with consequences. Twitter collapsed a few days later, and Isaacson directly linked the outage to the server move. There were, it turned out, 70,000 hard-coded references to the Sacramento facility in Twitter’s codebase that no one had flagged. When Ron DeSantis tried to launch his presidential campaign on Twitter Spaces in May 2023, the event became a technical disaster — widely attributed, in part, to the fallout from the Sacramento shutdown. “In retrospect, the whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake,” Musk admitted in March 2023. “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 stuff that’s broken because of it.”
The story captures something consistent about how Musk operates: a very high tolerance for chaos, a contempt for timelines he considers excessive, and a willingness to do things himself when he decides the people around him are moving too slowly. It’s the same instinct that led him to cut Twitter’s workforce by 80 percent within weeks of taking over — a move that, by some accounts, exposed just how bloated the org had become, with a former employee noting it once took the company eight months just to ship an edit button. It also echoes the broader pattern that followed his $44 billion acquisition: fast, aggressive, and often painful decisions made on instinct rather than process.
Whether the Sacramento incident looks like inspired urgency or reckless impulsiveness probably depends on your prior views of Musk. What’s harder to argue with is that the biographer who watched it all happen thought it was worth a book.