Elon Musk and Sergey Brin both said OpenAI president Greg Brockman had asked them for compute, according to a Colossus feature published on 30 October. “[Greg] Brockman at dinner was hounding me for compute,” Musk said, Colossus reports. “He was asking me for compute,” Brin said.
The exchange took place while six executives waited to receive national medals from President Trump. Colossus writes that the conversation on the floor “turned to compute. It was, to the benefit of Nvidia’s CEO, in short supply.”
Business Pill · The Memory Wall
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on memory as an AI constraint. It teaches the general idea only and says nothing about the people in this piece.
The key insight: Colossus quotes Elon Musk and Sergey Brin each saying OpenAI president Greg Brockman asked them for compute; in the same conversation, Musk called the memory market the worst supply chain price shock he had seen.
The six were Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Satya Nadella, Lisa Su and Michael Dell, held by the Secret Service in an auditorium before the ceremony. A photo caption in the feature dates the summit to 8 October 2026. Colossus describes them as executives “who between them own or control companies worth around $18 trillion”.
Musk, Colossus writes, “marveled at his sense of the man’s chutzpah”. He added: “Dude, you stole my charity! You can’t be a huge dick then ask for favors, hello?” The feature notes that Brockman’s 2010s diary “became relevant in court when Musk began his unsuccessful lawsuit against Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, in 2024”.
Colossus posted the passage on X on 1 November with the line “Elon Musk and Sergey Brin discussing Greg Brockman, who had asked them both for compute.”
Memory and storage as a share of the parts cost of a $699-tier mainstream PC rose from 16% (about $70) to 42% (about $294), according to Omdia data reported by FourWeekMBA on 31 October 2026. The multiple and difference are our arithmetic. Musk’s quote is as reported by Colossus. FourWeekMBA.
What Was Posted on X
Elon Musk and Sergey Brin discussing Greg Brockman, who had asked them both for compute.
Colossus posted the passage on X on 1 November: “Elon Musk and Sergey Brin discussing Greg Brockman, who had asked them both for compute.” The image reproduces the feature’s account, in which Musk says Brockman “at dinner was hounding me for compute” and Brin says “He was asking me for compute.”
The Memory Squeeze in the Same Room
The feature says the shortage of compute “was nothing compared to the lack of memory chips”. “I’ve never in my life seen a supply chain price shock like it,” Musk told the group, Colossus reports. The feature describes him as “in disbelief at Micron’s 87 percent gross margin this past quarter”.
Nadella, according to the feature, said of Micron’s capex plans: “They’re not really putting the money back”.
Omdia data we reported show the squeeze in one product: memory and storage rose from 16% to 42% of the parts cost of a $699-tier mainstream PC, from about $70 to about $294, as we reported. By our arithmetic, that is 2.6 times the share and about $224 more per PC.
The Business Lever: Compute as a Favour
As we read the exchange, compute is scarce enough that OpenAI’s president asked two rivals for it directly. Musk wrote on X on 31 October that “There will be a total of around 1.2M Blackwells at Colossus 2 by end of year”, as we reported.
Brockman is also among the 20 biggest midterm donors at $50 million with his wife Anna, on a New York Times list we covered on 1 November.
The Structural Read
As we read the Colossus account, compute was scarce enough that OpenAI’s president asked two other technology leaders for it, one of whom, Musk, had sued OpenAI’s CEO.
As we read the memory remarks, Colossus writes that the lack of compute “was nothing compared to the lack of memory chips”, and reports Nadella said of Micron’s capex plans, “They’re not really putting the money back”.
As we read the Omdia data we reported, the same squeeze shows up in a mainstream PC, where memory and storage went from 16% to 42% of the parts cost, 2.6 times the share by our arithmetic.
The framework says “HBM growth is outpacing accelerator demand, making memory the rate-limiting factor in the AI scaling equation.”
As we read it, the Colossus account adds a first-hand view of that constraint: Colossus reports Musk calling memory the worst supply chain price shock he had seen. The framework predates the feature and does not discuss it.
Colossus does not say when the dinner took place, how much compute Brockman asked for, or whether either executive agreed. Neither OpenAI nor Brockman is quoted in the passage. The quotes are as reported by Colossus; the feature does not say how the exchange was recorded, and we have not seen a recording.
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A Colossus feature quotes Elon Musk and Sergey Brin saying OpenAI president Greg Brockman asked each of them for compute. In the same conversation, Musk called the memory market the worst price shock he had seen; Omdia data show memory and storage rose from 16% to 42% of a mainstream PC’s parts cost.
A note on sourcing. The quotations and the account of the exchange come from a Colossus feature by Harry T. Lambert published on 30 October 2026, and from Colossus posts on X. The PC parts-cost figures are Omdia data we reported on 31 October. The multiple and difference are our arithmetic.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
