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AI prodigy Leopold Aschenbrenner’s wedding weekend brought together a who’s who of Silicon Valley money and influence for a multi-day celebration.
But there was a big elephant in room: just days before, the 24-year-old’s $45 billion hedge fund, Situational Awareness, had imploded, suffering losses of more than $30 billion, and mounting.
Many of the 80 to 100 Silicon Valley heavyweights who turned up for the lavish Carmel-by-the-Sea ceremony were investors in Aschenbrenner’s fund.
Guests had been invited to networking sessions meant to spark conversations about investment ideas and AI trends.
But in what can only be described as peak Bay Area tech culture, these sessions were quietly reworked from bullish market discussions, to sessions about life and philosophy.
Still, the fund’s collapse didn’t derail the festivities.
The wedding went ahead, with attendees sipping Napa Valley wine while a DJ spun a Berghain-style set inspired by Aschenbrenner’s German roots, before calling it a night at just 11 p.m.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei reportedly did not attend.
“It wasn’t like Aschenbrenner went broke and couldn’t pay for the venue or the caterer,” one person familiar with the wedding told Vanity Fair.
The tech billionaire struck a deal to offload about $3.5 billion worth of the fund’s private stake in Anthropic to a group of venture capital investors in an effort to avoid a massive margin call, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Then in a last-minute handbrake turn, the deal was scrapped after Ken Griffin’s Citadel agreed to buy the bulk of the fund’s public equity portfolio, giving the firm another source of liquidity.
Aschenbrenner’s rise has been just as dramatic as his fund’s recent troubles.
The German national graduated as Columbia University’s valedictorian at 19, co-founding an effective altruism club.
Aschenbrenner became a darling of the tech world after publishing his 165-page manifesto, Situational Awareness, in 2024.
He launched a hedge fund with the same name, arguing AI fortunes wouldn’t be made from chatbots, but from the chips, memory, data centers, electricity, cooling and networking that powered them.
Situational Awareness raised $100 million in November 2024, with fees surging more than 1,000% as it attracted a cult-like following, with rivals rushing to copy his trades, according to The New York Times.
But the blockbuster returns came with blockbuster risk.
The fund used leverage of up to four times its capital, CNBC reported.
When AI stocks turned south, relatively modest declines triggered margin calls that threatened to unravel the firm.
He later worked at Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, where he met Balwit.
After FTX collapsed and Bankman-Fried was later convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges, Aschenbrenner joined OpenAI while Balwit landed at Anthropic as CEO Dario Amodei’s chief of staff.
His OpenAI stint ended in April 2024 after he was fired for allegedly sharing sensitive internal information with Holden Karnofsky, whose wife works at Anthropic, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Aschenbrenner has said the document had already been reviewed for sensitive information and that it was “totally normal” to share that kind of information with outside researchers for feedback.
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