Tech bro’s AI fund collapses days before lavish California marriage ceremony
A 24-year-old Silicon Valley AI prodigy watched his $45 billion hedge fund implode just days before strolling down the aisle for his lavish California marriage ceremony.
Leopold Aschenbrenner, the founder of the AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness, was placing the ending touches on his marriage ceremony in Carmel this week when his high-flying investment empire started to unravel after reportedly borrowing closely to make huge AI bets.
The German-born investor, and turtleneck fanatic, amassed a staggering $45 billion portfolio by piling into AI shares and taking a huge private stake in Anthropic.
Leopold Aschenbrenner, 24, is the founder of the AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness. Columbia College
Aschenbrenner was placing the final touches on his marriage ceremony this week in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Getty Images
As his portfolio tumbled, Aschenbrenner scrambled to stop the bleeding, interesting to some of the world’s greatest hedge funds and promoting billions of {dollars} in holdings to Ken Griffin’s Citadel, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In a letter to traders Thursday, Aschenbrenner said he had bought half of his public stock portfolio and vowed to concentrate on risk management “to ensure a higher level of resilience going forward.”
The German-born AI wonderkid noticed his $45 billion portfolio collapsing just days before his marriage. Linkedin/Leopold Aschenbrenner
Despite the dramatic selloff, his firm still manages a portfolio valued at more than $10 billion.
Aschenbrenner’s meteoric rise has been almost as exceptional as his latest fall.
He graduated from Columbia University at just 19 before working at Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. He later joined OpenAI in 2023, the place he was half of a team tasked with overseeing synthetic superintelligence.
He was fired roughly a 12 months later after allegedly leaking delicate info to the husband of an Anthropic govt.
The setback did little to slow his rise in Silicon Valley.
Avital Balwit is now married to Aschenbrenner. X/@AvitalBalwit
Aschenbrenner turned an AI celeb after publishing a 165-page essay, “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” which earned reward from figures including Ivanka Trump and helped entice deep-pocketed traders to his firm.
Situational Awareness focuses on investments tied to synthetic common intelligence and has been backed by tech heavyweights including Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
Dubbed the “Nostradamus of AI,” Aschenbrenner met his fiancée Avital Balwit while the pair labored at FTX. She now serves as chief of workers to Anthropic’s CEO.
Now, instead of celebrating one of the greatest weeks of his life solely as a newlywed, the AI wunderkind is also making an attempt to rebuild one of the most spectacular hedge fund collapses in latest reminiscence.
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