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Elon Musk criticises Sam Altman for saying it’s ‘quite terrible’ to keep RAM in personal computers
Elon Musk criticized Sam Altman after the OpenAI CEO called it terrible for people to keep underused RAM in personal computers amid a global memory shortage.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently drew backlash for saying that people keeping RAM in their personal computers is an inefficient use of the world's limited memory supply. The OpenAI CEO made the comments during an appearance on Cheeky Pint, the podcast hosted by Stripe co-founder John Collison, in an episode released on October 29, 2026.
His remarks have attracted attention because they come amid a global RAM shortage, with memory prices rising as demand from AI data centres increases.
(Also read: AI Causing a Memory Shortage. Why Producers Aren’t Rushing to Make a Lot More)
What exactly did Sam Altman say?
Discussing the growing interest in running AI models locally on personal computers, rather than relying on cloud-based systems, Sam Altman said: “A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now because we are going to have open-source models, we're going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data center.
“But 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.
“You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment,” he said.
(Also read: Why RAM prices are exploding and how AI is to blame: Explained simply)
DRAM stands for Dynamic Random-Access Memory. It is the type of memory commonly used as RAM in computers, laptops and servers.
Elon Musk criticises Sam Altman
Elon Musk was among the more high-profile voices who criticised the CEO of OpenAI for his remarks on memory.
The world’s richest man, who is also the founder of OpenAI rival xAI, shared a meme yesterday targeting Altman.
“The people deserve to have their RAM too!” Musk wrote.
Later, when an X user commented under his post to use a slur against Altman, Musk seemed to agree. “Sam Altman says it's "quite terrible" that people have ram. He is a r****d,” the user said.
“Seriously,” Musk agreed.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman were once close collaborators who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit artificial intelligence research organisation. Musk was one of its biggest early financial backers, contributing around $38 million, according to CNBC.
However, disagreements over the company's leadership, funding and future direction led to a falling-out. Their relationship has since turned into a bitter public and legal feud, with Musk accusing Altman of abandoning OpenAI's original non-profit mission in favour of making money.
