In his first months owning Twitter, Elon Musk in his zeal to cut costs personally came to Sacramento on Christmas Eve to shut down a data center, according to the new biography “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson.
According to the book, Musk was in a foul mood on Dec. 22 last year as he was looking for costs to cut at Twitter, which is now known as X Corp. He had found a $100 million-a-year contract with NTT Global Data Centers' location in Sacramento. Twitter, founded in 2006, had leased server space since its early days in Sacramento from co-location data center company RagingWire, which was later acquired by NTT.
On Oct. 28, Musk had completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. A week later, on Nov. 4, Twitter announced in an email that it was beginning layoffs that would cut half its staff of 7,500. In radio interviews, Musk said Twitter would go out of business if it didn’t cut more costs.
By Dec. 22, Musk was looking for more expenses to cut. In a meeting with managers, Musk decided to move Twitter’s Sacramento servers to one of Twitter’s data centers in Portland, Oregon, according to the book.
“Another manager at the meeting said that couldn’t be done right away. ‘We can’t get out safely before six to nine months,’ she said in a matter-of-fact tone. 'Sacramento still needs to be around to serve traffic,'" according to Isaacson’s account.
"Over the years, Musk had been faced many times with a choice between what he thought was necessary and what others told him was possible. The result was almost always the same. He paused in silence for a few moments, then announced, ‘You have 90 days to do it. If you can’t make that work, your resignation is accepted,'" according to the book.
The manager explained to Musk that it would be difficult to make changes quickly because of rack densities and power densities, but Musk interrupted her, saying "this is making my brain hurt."
He ordered the work done in weeks rather than months. He then boarded his private jet in San Francisco, intending to fly to Austin, Texas. But while in the air over Las Vegas, he diverted the flight to Sacramento to go to the data center.
The NTT data center was secure and required a retinal scan to get into the vaults. The Twitter vault had some 5,200 "refrigerator-size racks of 30 computers each," the book said. Musk reportedly said the servers didn’t look hard to move, despite that each rack weighed 2,500 pounds and was 8 feet tall.
“Musk turned to his security guard and asked to borrow his pocket knife. Using it, he was able to lift one of the air vents in the floor, which allowed him to pry open the floor panels. He then crawled under the server floor himself, used the knife to jimmy open an electrical cabinet, pulled the server plugs and waited to see what happened. Nothing exploded. The server was ready to be moved,” according to the book.
The next day, Christmas Eve, Musk and a growing crew of support staff, started moving servers. They had moved eight of them onto rental trucks when NTT executives told them to stop because moving the heavy server cabinets could damage the floor.
Musk and crew then hired a local moving company, rather than the data center experts NTT suggested, to move the servers.
“By the end of the week, they had used all of the available trucks in Sacramento. Despite the area being pummeled by rain, they moved more than 700 of the racks in three days. The previous record at that facility had been moving 30 in a month,” according to the book.
The rest of the servers were moved in January. Musk had done what his managers had said couldn’t be done, but there was a cost.
“For the next two months, X was destabilized. The lack of servers caused meltdowns, including when Musk hosted a Twitter Spaces for presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. ‘In retrospect, the whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake,’ Musk would admit 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 shit that’s broken because of it,'" according to the book.
Ironically, one of Musk’s other companies, Tesla Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA), has since taken over the X data vaults at NTT’s location in Sacramento, according to the trade publication DatacenterDynamics.
Tokyo-based NTT Communications Corp. bought an 80% stake in RagingWire in 2013 for $350 million. NTT bought the remaining 20% in 2018.
