Tech bro’s AI fund collapses days before lavish California wedding

A 24-year-old Silicon Valley AI prodigy watched his $45 billion hedge fund implode just days before walking down the aisle for his lavish California wedding.

Leopold Aschenbrenner, the founder of the AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness, was putting the finishing touches on his wedding in Carmel this week when his high-flying investment empire began to unravel after reportedly borrowing heavily to make massive AI bets.

The German-born investor, and turtleneck enthusiast, amassed a staggering $45 billion portfolio by piling into AI stocks and taking a huge private stake in Anthropic.

As his portfolio tumbled, Aschenbrenner scrambled to stop the bleeding, appealing to some of the world’s biggest hedge funds and selling billions of dollars in holdings to Ken Griffin’s Citadel, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In a letter to investors Thursday, Aschenbrenner said he had sold part of his public stock portfolio and vowed to focus on risk management “to ensure a higher level of resilience going forward.”

Despite the dramatic selloff, his firm still manages a portfolio valued at more than $10 billion.

Aschenbrenner’s meteoric rise has been nearly as remarkable as his recent fall.

He graduated from Columbia University at just 19 before working at Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. He later joined OpenAI in 2023, where he was part of a team tasked with overseeing artificial superintelligence.

He was fired roughly a year later after allegedly leaking sensitive information to the husband of an Anthropic executive.

The setback did little to slow his rise in Silicon Valley.

Aschenbrenner became an AI celebrity after publishing a 165-page essay, “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” which earned praise from figures including Ivanka Trump and helped attract deep-pocketed investors to his firm.

Situational Awareness focuses on investments tied to artificial general 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 worked at FTX. She now serves as chief of staff to Anthropic’s CEO.

Now, instead of celebrating one of the biggest weeks of his life solely as a newlywed, the AI wunderkind is also trying to rebuild one of the most spectacular hedge fund collapses in recent memory.

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