Elon Musk has joined the growing backlash over Sam Altman’s recent comments on RAM.
Last week, the OpenAI CEO sparked outrage across the internet and, specifically, within the gamer community, when he said he thought it was “terrible” for people to have RAM in their PCs rather than a data center.
In an interview with YouTuber Cheeky Pint, Altman said: “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% of the time. Like, you want maximum utilization 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.”
The comments have been widely ridiculed, with many suggesting that, whether he intended it or not, Altman sounds like he wants to take away personal ownership of memory and force society to use resources for the benefit of AI companies such as his. Social media was flooded with posts, images, and videos of people slamming Altman for the suggestion, promising to protect their precious memory from any who might try to claim it. Others have simply dunked on Altman for the comments, with countless memes and, yes, AI-generated videos showing the AI billionaire in various states of embarrassment.
Here’s 576GB worth of go f*ck yourself Sam Altman https://t.co/X4ewhFK0cp
— ᴼᴺᴳ (@OngDevLab) October 30, 2026
Using a stick of RAM to stir my coffee this morning, fuck you, Sam Altman
— Sick (@sickdotdev) November 1, 2026
sam altman: your ram should be in data centers
me with 32 gigs of ram: https://t.co/0VR1kvgtxO
— Micky D (@DeMickyD) October 31, 2026
Found on reddit. Hilarious https://t.co/43Exuo1b3r
— wayward strategy (@waywardstrategy) November 1, 2026
Speaking of AI billionaires, his tech rival, Elon Musk, got in on the act with a meme of his own, letting his millions of followers know where he stands on the subject of memory ownership.
“The people deserve to have their RAM too!” Musk declared in a post on X, the social media platform he owns, alongside a meme of Colonel Hans Landa from Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds.
The people deserve to have their RAM too! https://t.co/q6dwauALw4
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2026
The AI boom has led to a scarcity of memory to power it, which in turn has caused graphics cards, video game consoles, and PC components to skyrocket in price. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have all raised the prices of their consoles as a result of the ‘RAMpocalypse,’ while the RTX 5080 just disappeared off of Nvidia’s marketplace, weeks after the RTX 5090 was all but discontinued.
Microsoft reportedly expects its next-gen Xbox, codenamed Project Helix, to cost as much as $1,800. Sony has yet to announce its next-gen hardware, but analysts suspect it will push back its launch for as long as possible amid cost concern.
Altman, though, is unlikely to change his line of thinking any time soon. He’s currently on the hunt for up to $20 billion in a new funding round co-led by UAE investors, down from an earlier target of about $30 billion, according to CNBC.
While Musk is happy to take shots at Altman, he’s having AI problems of his own. In a remarkable tweet, the Tesla and SpaceX owner appeared to admit to throttling Grok Bot for being “unsustainably” expensive. Users had complained there were hitting limits sooner than expected, and Musk replied to one such complaint to say the cost of running the AI agent was “unsustainably high relative to revenue.”
This in turn sparked an explosion of comments across social media, with many suggesting Musk’s admission here signalled a significant issue with the economics of generative AI itself. Grok Bot, launched in beta in August with paid weekly active users nearing 800,000 by late October. The agent runs autonomous tasks on virtual computers, demanding far more compute than simple chatbots. Heavy users faced sudden lockouts and frustration, with some canceling plans.
In a follow-up tweet replying to one person highlighting the potential impact of Musk’s statement, he said: “Just being sensible.”
Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images. Photo by Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images.