Humor in Leadership: What "Ram Altman" Got Right and Wrong

Last week the CEO of OpenAI turned himself into a pun, and it's one of the better lessons in humor in leadership I've seen this year. It's a mixed lesson, though, which is what makes it useful.

On a podcast, Sam Altman said it was "quite terrible" for so much of the world's memory supply to sit inside people's personal computers. PC builders and gamers, who are already paying a lot for RAM, did not enjoy hearing that. A few days later Altman changed his display name on X to "Ram Altman," a joke people had been throwing at him, and said his comments had been taken out of context.

So he took the joke instead of fighting it. Good instinct. He also, in my opinion, used it as the whole answer. That part is where most managers I work with get into trouble, and it's why this is worth ten minutes of your time even if you've never thought about DRAM in your life.

What did Sam Altman actually say about RAM?

Altman was a guest on John Collison's Cheeky Pint podcast. Gizmodo's Tom McKay quoted him saying "it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer," and "You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment." Crypto Briefing dates the episode to Oct. 29.

Memory is expensive right now, and Gizmodo's reporting ties a big part of the squeeze to demand from AI data centers, OpenAI's included. So the guy whose company's data centers are part of that demand told everyone else they were using theirs inefficiently. That went over about as well as you'd guess.

Digit reports that Elon Musk piled on with "The people deserve to have their RAM too!" without naming Altman.

Why the "Ram Altman" joke worked

A user on X suggested he go by "Ram Altman." On Nov. 4, he did it. According to Digit, Indian users then connected the new name to Lord Ram and started wishing him a happy Diwali, so the joke got a second life he didn't plan.

From a comedy standpoint, he got the basics right. He made himself the target. Self-deprecation is the safest joke a leader has, because there's no one below you on the receiving end. When you're the punchline, people relax.

He let the audience write it. The name came from the people criticizing him. Taking their joke and wearing it tells them you heard them. In a club, that's what a good comic does with a heckler who's actually funny. You don't fight them. You give them the point, the room laughs, and now you're on the same side for a minute.

And he kept it small: a display name, with no video, no press release and no "as a leader, I believe in laughter" post.

There's real research behind why that kind of move can help. In a set of experiments by Brad Bitterly, Alison Wood Brooks and Maurice Schweitzer, as the Harvard Gazette summarized them, "those who made funny and appropriate remarks or jokes were rated highest in confidence and competence." The same research found that "people who told inappropriate and unfunny jokes were perceived as having low competence." So the same move that makes a leader look sure of themselves can make them look clueless if the joke is aimed wrong.

Where humor in leadership stops working

If Altman were in one of my workshops, this is where I'd stop the tape. The joke came packaged with "you took me out of context." Per Gizmodo, he wrote "i actually do want the world to have tons of memory," and said he has "been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time." Crypto Briefing quotes another reply: "i want you to have so much ram lets build more."

Maybe that's all true. I'm a comedian, not a chip analyst. But look at it from the side of the person who just paid way too much for a stick of memory. Their problem is the price. What they got back was a pun and a correction of their reading comprehension. Gizmodo's headline on the follow-up was openly sarcastic, which tells you how at least part of the audience took it.

One of the rules I teach is simple: humor only works where trust already exists, and it can't stand in for a fix. A joke can open the door. Then you have to walk through it with something real, even if the real thing is "I said that badly, here's what I meant, and I get why it stung." Right now, a lot of the people who were mad have a name change and no answer to the thing they were mad about.

I see the managerial version of this all the time. A leader announces a change the team hates, senses the tension, and cracks a joke to get through the meeting. The room laughs, politely, and nobody feels any better. The only person that joke helped was the one telling it.

How to use humor at work when your team is upset

If you're a manager and you just stepped in it, here's what I'd do tomorrow:

• Be the target. Joke about yourself or the situation, never about the people who are upset.
• Borrow their joke if they already made one. It's proof you're listening, and it's usually funnier than whatever you'd write.
• Say the plain sentence too. "I put that badly" or "I got that wrong" has to show up near the joke, not three posts later.
• Answer the actual complaint. If people are worried about cost, schedule or workload, talk about cost, schedule or workload. Don't relitigate what you meant.
• Then stop. One good joke builds goodwill. A second and third one start to look like you're performing instead of listening.

People will forgive a leader who's a little clumsy if they trust that leader to take them seriously when it counts. That's what approachable leadership looks like to the people on the other side of the desk. The joke shows them you're a person, and the follow-through is how you build trust with your team.

This is exactly the stuff we practice in our corporate humor workshops: where a joke helps, where it hurts, and how to tell the difference before you're in front of the room. If you want more, read Embracing Humor: A Catalyst for Strong Leadership and Unified Teams, see how a brand got it badly wrong in my breakdown of Martha Stewart's Halloween post, or browse everything on leadership humor.

Anyone can change their name to a pun. Teaching your managers what to say right after the laugh is the part I can help with.