Elon Musk mocks Sam Altman: Idle DRAM in home computers is a waste

Elon Musk mocked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on X with a meme regarding the idle memory of home computers. In an interview on the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, Altman stated that from a global resource allocation perspective, allowing the world's limited DRAM supply to sit idle in personal computers and only being used 5% of the time is "quite bad." In a constrained supply environment, it should be maximized in the cloud, but many people's intuition is contrary to this.

Musk posted a meme of the Nazi officer Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz in "Inglourious Basterds," on Sunday, captioned "You are withholding DRAM and not giving it to the cloud, right?" and wrote, "People should also have their own RAM!"

This clash is a continuation of the long-standing conflict between the two OpenAI co-founders. The two co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with others, and Musk left in 2018. Musk sued OpenAI and Altman in 2024, accusing them of deviating from the nonprofit mission of the open organization; in May of this year, a federal jury in California dismissed the $150 billion lawsuit, ruling that OpenAI, Altman, and President Greg Brockman bore no liability on all counts. Altman also attributed part of the memory shortage to the caution of storage manufacturers, stating that in the past, DRAM producers "invested $20 billion in capital expenditures but only earned $19 billion," and companies that experienced previous overcapacity cycles are slow to expand production.