His $45 Billion hedge fund is now a $10 Billion hedge fund:
Two years ago, Leopold Aschenbrenner argued he was one of few people in the world who saw the future clearly.
In a sprawling, 165-page essay that became required reading in Silicon Valley, the former OpenAI researcher positioned himself as a kind of prophet for the coming age of artificial super intelligence.
Leopold Aschenbrenner Situational Awareness fund: $45B to fire sale
Guess he didn’t see that coming? His track record as a prophet just went up in smoke.
How the arrogant 24-year-old hedge fund manager was saved by the old guys
Where does this leave Leopold, the large-toothed 24-year-old German Wunderkind who was aged around six at the time of the 2008 financial crisis? Not looking quite as “situationally aware” as he’d claimed to be in the seminal essay that made his name, but not looking like an average 24-year-old either. The WSJ notes that Leopold still has $10bn of assets under management. He still has his private investment in Anthropic. He still owns a mansion in the “Nob Hill” neighbourhood of San Francisco. He is now promising investors “a higher level of resilience going forward.”
Nonetheless, Leopold’s superhuman sheen is less than before. After positioning himself as an unusually insightful guy and deriding “wordcels” who don’t do mathematics and don’t understand the coming AI revolution as explained by his favourite chart below, Leopold has revealed himself to be a guy so enamoured of his own beliefs that he leveraged his investments up a reported 3-4 times with no effective hedges. His investors have also revealed themselves to be so enamoured of Leopold that they have lost half their money.
Kind of sounds like a Covid-era public health official.
