Elon Musk Mocks Sam Altman Over Claim That Idle Home-PC DRAM Is Wasteful

Elon Musk mocked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on X with a meme about Altman’s comments on unused memory in home computers. According to ChainCatcher, Altman said in an interview on the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint that leaving limited global DRAM supplies idle in personal computers, where they are used only 5% of the time, is “pretty bad” from a global resource-allocation perspective. He argued that, amid supply constraints, DRAM should be used as fully as possible in the cloud, though many people’s intuition runs counter to that view. On Sunday, Musk posted a meme featuring Hans Landa, the Nazi officer played by Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, with the caption, “You’re hoarding DRAM instead of giving it to the cloud, right?” He added, “People should have their own RAM too!” The exchange continues a long-running feud between the two OpenAI co-founders. Musk and others founded OpenAI in 2015, and Musk left in 2018. In 2024, he sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging they had abandoned the organization’s open, nonprofit mission. This May, a federal jury in California rejected the $150 billion lawsuit, finding OpenAI, Altman and President Greg Brockman not liable on all claims. In the interview, Altman also partly attributed the memory shortage to storage manufacturers’ caution. He said DRAM producers had previously invested $20 billion in capital expenditure but made only $19 billion, and that companies were slow to expand production after earlier periods of oversupply.