Musk mocks Altman over remark that idle PC memory is "quite terrible"

Nov 2, 2026
Elon Musk mocked Sam Altman after the OpenAI chief said it is quite terrible for scarce DRAM to sit in personal computers amid a memory shortage.

Elon Musk has mocked OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman over remarks that it is "quite terrible" for scarce computer memory to sit in personal computers, the Hindustan Times reports. "The people deserve to have their RAM too!" Musk wrote on X, sharing a meme aimed at Altman.

Altman made the comments on Cheeky Pint, the podcast hosted by Stripe co-founder John Collison, in an episode released on October 29. "From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time," he said, arguing for maximum utilization in the cloud in a supply constrained market.

The remarks drew criticism because they come amid a global memory shortage, with prices rising as AI data centers absorb more DRAM. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI with Altman and later founded rival xAI, is in a long running public and legal dispute with him.

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