If someone doesn't know that person by name, here is a picture of him:

About $15 per CPU on ebay or so, so about $121,000 USD for the CPU's alone

I haven't run anything older than Skylake since 2020. I imagine anyone planning to run these either hasn't done the math on energy costs or lives somewhere where electricity is dirt cheap.

Pretty crazy to think that it is actually not sure whether spending less than 500k on a supercomputer is worth it.

Has more to do with the market for supercomputers. They are monsters to keep fed so it's not a question of if you can buy it but rather if you can run it. But customers for supercomputers are in the market because they need the most raw power that the technology is capable of supplying, so buying and installing a decade old supercomputer (which is going to have the same operating costs at a lower capability than a new one) doesn't make sense.

You also have to consider that the downtime's going to be a lot higher on this equipment as you're going to start having components hit the end of their useful life.

What about the metal costs? Is this thing worth at this price for disassembly and salvaging?

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Let’s not get carried away.

The piecemeal nature of selling thousands of parts means the wages for a group necessary to coordinate it all would probably make the whole thing not feasible.

Ebay prices are higher than market prices imo. 15% ebay cut + 3% paypal fees + sales tax + shipping is brutal.

Yes and no. You can sell easily 2-3 units at the current price, but 8000 pieces...

Technology is improving fast, the E5-2697 v4 has a similar benchmark to a Ryzen 5600, which uses half the power, and making a computer with desktop components is cheaper (except for used registered ECC RAM which is being dumped for cheap)

And that Ryzen is the old generation, the newer are even faster