Elon Musk says people deserve RAM too after Sam Altman’s controversial PC memory remarks
Follow UsElon Musk backed PC users with a post saying, 'The people deserve to have their RAM too.'
Sam Altman called it is 'quite terrible' for people to keep large amounts of DRAM in personal computers that remain underused.
Altman's comments sparked online backlash amid a global memory chip shortage driven by rising AI demand.
X owner Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have made headlines in the past for their counter viewpoints in the past. And it appears Musk got another chance to grill Altman through his recent statement. For context, the statements of the man running the firm that gave the world ChatGPT, in a recent interview with YouTube Cheeky Pint, concerning DRAM allocation for personal PCs have gained varying reactions online. The CEO’s words attracted backlash across social media platforms, with the prominent ones being X (formerly Twitter).
SurveyJoining this stage, the Tesla CEO Musk backed the pro-people perspective that supports having more RAM on personal computers, unlike what Altman believes should be the ideal allocation. “The people deserve to have their RAM too,” Musk posted on X. This meme features Christoph Waltz (as an SS officer) from the movie Inglourious Basterds (2009) featuring text: “You are withholding DRAM from the cloud, are you not?”
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The people deserve to have their RAM too! https://t.co/q6dwauALw4
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2026
Musk’s post garnered a range of reactions. He responded with a laughing emoji on the meme that said: “Tell Sam Altman that I use 64GB of RAM to play roller coaster tycoon. I want him to know it was me. Another user said: “Sam Altman says it’s ‘quite terrible’ that people have RAM. He is a retard,” to which the X owner replied, “seriously”.
What did Sam Altman say in the podcast?
During the conversation with host John Collison, Sam Altman seemed unconvinced about people holding DRAM on their PCs and not utilising it 24×7 (like AI cloud processing), affecting the limited supply of the component that could otherwise be used in data centres. “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 5 per cent of the time (video timestamp: 29:21),” the OpenAI CEO said.
“You want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that,” Altman added in the podcast. He also pushed back the idea of running AI models on-device. The remarks came as the world faces a shortage of RAM and storage due to limited supply against the skyrocketing demand for memory chips by AI companies for training AI models and maintaining their operations.
