The Crazyness When Musk Decided to Personally Rip Servers Out of a Data Center

9 months is just crazy to shuffle boxes from one place to the other, all while bleeding cash.

“These things do not look that hard to move,” Elon announced. It was a reality-distorting assertion, since each rack weighed about 2,500 pounds and was eight feet tall.

“You’ll have to hire a contractor to lift the floor panels,” Alex said. “They need to be lifted with suction cups.” Another set of contractors, he said, would then have to go underneath the floor panels and disconnect the electric cables and seismic rods.

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.

You can sort of see the Musk logic and way of thinking where he tries to argue that moving heavy racks over the flooring is within spec because the weight is split over 4 feet (all of which can sit on the same load-bearing element).

Or the part where he goes under a rack and cuts a bunch of cables. Good luck getting those servers hooked up at the other end.

I understand that some user data is important, and they should have been wiped. But is it really that bad they weren't? It's not like people have their SSNs on Twitter.

I'll leave it to the security experts here to comment but I totally get why someone would read this story and find his behavior inspirational and not horrific.