Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - ​​The Insane Collapse of Silicon Valley's 'Nostradamus of AI'

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

The Wild Rise and Fall of Leopold AschenbrennerLISTEN AD-FREE!! 👇🏻 Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at https://www.usermag.co        Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz   Until a week ago, Leopold Aschenbrenner was hailed as the "Nostradamus of AI". A 24-year-old former OpenAI researcher whose 165-page manifesto, Situational Awareness, convinced Silicon Valley and Wall Street that superintelligence was coming faster than anyone expected, his hedge fund ballooned to over $20 billion. Then, it came crashing down. In this episode of Power User, WSJ reporter Berber Jin joins me to break down the meteoric rise and fall of Leopold Aschenbrenner, from his early days in the effective altruism movement and FTX's Future Fund, to his controversial exit from OpenAI, to the margin calls, Citadel bailout, and chaos that unfolded the very same week he got married We discuss what Aschenbrenner's spectacular blowup tells us about Silicon Valley, AI hype, and the rush to bet billions on AI.Follow Berber Jin (Wall Street Journal): https://twitter.com/berber_jin Read Berber's story: https://www.wsj.com/finance/leopold-aschenbrenner-situational-awareness-ai-fund-597633d3  

It is kind of crazy. Like he's, I think people forget, he's only 24 years old, and he had no prior investing experience. And he's managing $20 billion. A year ago, Leopold Ashenbrenner was being hailed as a genius. The former Open AI researcher turned influential AI profit, published a manifesto called situational awareness that took Silicon Valley by storm.

It's what convinced large swaths of leaders in the tech, business, and media landscape that the age of superintelligence was arriving a lot faster than anyone previously expected. Leopold was being called the Nostradamus of AI, and podcaster Tim Ferriss said that his viral paper situational awareness was, quote, as close to clairvoyant as you could possibly be. It's no surprise, then, that plenty of rich people wanted to throw money at this man, despite the fact that he was only 23 years old.

Investors rushed to back his new hedge fund, betting that no one understood the coming AI boom better, than Leopold himself. But almost as quickly as he has risen, billions of dollars suddenly evaporated in one of Wall Street's most dramatic AI blowups yet. Berber Jin is a reporter at the Wall Street Journal covering AI startups and venture capital. And today he's joining me to break down the absolutely insane rise and fall of Leopold Aschenbrenner. We're going to talk about what it says about Silicon Valley, our tech landscape, and where the future of AI is headed. Hi, Berber. Welcome to Power User. It's great to be here, Taylor.

Okay, so I want to kind of talk a little bit about who Leopold is and how he came to be. So Leopold, he's only 24 years old. He grew up in Berlin, Germany, and came over to the States and went to school at Columbia University in New York. He graduated early at age 19, and he was the valedictorian at Columbia. He studied economics. Yeah, I can't believe he graduated when he was so young, and he remembered. I mean, so young.

But while he was at Columbia, he also started the effective altruism club. And it seems like this is an ideology that he got involved with at a pretty young age. He became involved in the EA community very early. Before I think AI really became a big topic of discussion amongst EA's. So he did a summer internship, I think, at an EA organization. And then after he graduated, he went to

work for the philanthropic arm of FTX. And I think that's when he really got immersed in that world. He was living in Berkeley, California at the time, and even went down once to the Bahamas, where Sam Bankman-Fried was living during parts of the pandemic. And so that was, I think, his real entryway into kind of the heart of the effect of altruism movement. And obviously, a really big part of EA is figuring out how best to use like the money of wealthy donors and use like very precise methods to determine where to allocate that money for philanthropic causes. So he was in charge of that grant making process for FTX. I think it was called futures fund was the name of the vehicle, right? Yeah. And of course he ended up working at future fund with his future

wife, Avital Balwit, who is now chief of staff at Anthropic. It's just interesting kind of how small this world is. Obviously, Dario is a really famous EA, but like you mentioned, it seems like Leo was really integrated into the AI, like Silicon Valley world, before AI had entered like the public consciousness in the same way. At the time, I mean, he was living in Berkeley, which was kind of the epicenter of both the effect of altruism movement and a lot of the AI researchers who were also steeped in that world. So, you know, there were a lot of kind of group houses and organizations that were in the EA orbit that were part of kind of the Berkeley intellectual scene.

And he was definitely very core to that world. As you mentioned, he met Avital Balwit, his wife, as a Saturday. You know, she was a Rhodes Scholar. And I guess I'm a little bit hazier in how she got into the world of EA. But, like, obviously now she is very central to. to that kind of network of people that emerged out of that movement. So that was the kind of intellectual universe that he stepped into after graduating from Columbia. And then obviously, he started working at Open AI, which really put him in the mix.

Can you talk a little bit about what he was doing at OpenAI? And when is this all taking place? Yeah. So he joined OpenAI in 2023. FTCS kind of collapsed spectacularly. Sam Bankman Fried went to prison. They had to, like, sell off their stakes in all these companies that they owned, including Anthropic.

Obviously, Leo was, like, looking for new things to do. He's, like, scrubbed his, like, history from his LinkedIn, which makes a lot of sense. I would probably have done the same thing. At the time, right, a lot of the effective altruists in the Bay Area had grown very interested in this question of AI alignment. They were very concerned that AI would become very powerful and go rogue and, potentially like destroy humanity. And so if you're an effective altruist, you want to maximize the amount of good with the resources that you have. And so a lot of people thought working on

AI alignment, making sure that AI systems were like pro-humanity was like a very important thing to do. And so when he joined Open AI, he actually initially joined to lead like grantmaking for Open AI. So, you know, it technically was still a nonprofit and he obviously led grantmaking at Future Fund, and he initially was brought on to, like, steer grants for AI projects that were in service of, like, AI alignment. Then shortly after that, he moved on to the super alignment team at OpenAI, which was led by Alia Siskiver, the chief scientists of Open AI at the time. And he kind of created this organization to basically try and conduct research that would ensure that AI was like pro-human and like wouldn't go rogue and like destroy humanity or cause

extinction. And so he was part of that kind of safety pills group of people with an open AI working for, I think his direct manager was Jan Leakey, who I believe is now at Anthropic. It's interesting that he ended up at Open AI, I guess, because these days it doesn't feel like open AI is really ascribed to that kind of ideology, like all of the things that you're saying, especially back then. And of course, Sutskover ended up leaving. There was all this chaos and Leopold left as well. When you're describing this belief system that he had,

it feels very anthropic coded. Like it is very EA. So did that ultimately cause tensions, you know, with him in Open AI? Yes, 100%. So that's a great point. It is very interesting that he went to Open AI instead of Anthropic.

I think like today, anyone in his shoes would go to Anthropic. But there was a very strong EA contingent at Open AI at the time. So this really came to the Ford during the blip when Sam Alman was briefly fired. He did not sign that letter, that famous letter, where all the other opening eye employees were like, bring Sam back.

He was not a signatory to that letter. And my understanding is that company leaders became a little bit suspicious of where his loyalties really were at because they were very paranoid that Anthropic was kind of behind the efforts to oust Sam and undermine Open AI. And because of his intellectual universe where he came from and obviously who his girlfriend was at the time, like there was a lot of suspicion of him. Can you explain for people that didn't follow that whole drama, the blip, the coup, whatever you want to call it?

Kind of like, what was that letter? What happened? And why was it so notable that like all of these Open AI staffers signed on to it? Yes. So Sam Alman, he was briefly ousted by his board of directors in November, 23, I believe, about a year after chat to be two. launched and the board said he wasn't being consistently candid in his communications. A lot of employees, like, struggle to understand why he was ousted because the board would just never clarify. And the company was kind of falling apart. And so the Sam loyalists created a petition or a letter to try and to rally support basically almost all of opening eyes employees

signed the letter being like, you know, we want Sam to be reinstated. We support his reinstatement as CEO. And I think that was like a big driver of the board eventually relenting and agreeing to bring him back subject to certain conditions. And almost everyone signed. Like I remember at the time I was like very surprised by how like almost the entire company signed that letter because the fact that he was fired would have obviously suggested that people weren't happy with him. But yes, Leo was not a signatory. I remember when all of this happened because it was like this crazy, like, weekend fugue state thing where, like, I feel like he was, he was out, and then he was back with it in such a short sort of period of time.

But Leo, meanwhile, eventually left Open AI. What led to his ouster there? So Open AI fired him for what the company felt was like him leaking sensitive information to people outside the company. And last week, I learned that one of those people was Holden Karnovsky, who, For people who are not steeped in like Silicon Valley lore, Holden Karnovsky is a very interesting character because he is a huge effect of altruist,

was kind of involved in the very early efforts to give funding and power to enable the principles of that movement. And he was a former opening eye board member who is very close to a lot of the anthropic leaders and is married to Daniela Amade, who is an anthropic co-founder. And so you can imagine when opening I found out that he was discussing company information with Holden,

they understandably kind of freaked out because it wasn't like he was sharing it with like random university professors, whatever. Like he was sharing it with someone that opening, I thought, was like very aligned with their biggest rival. And Sam and Holden have had friction, had friction when Holden was on the board.

And Holden's successor on the board was involved in, like, ousting Sam. So there was like a whole very fraught history between Holden and Sam and Open AI. I should say that like Holden would maintain that like Leo didn't share anything like super confidential with him. But opening I says that was the reason why he was fired. Maybe there were other things at play, right? But that's kind of the ostensible reason for why he was dismissed. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below

or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.com. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues and for challenging power. As you can imagine, advertisers are not exactly eager to work with somebody who covers a lot of the topics that I cover and talks about the things that I talk about. These videos I make are entirely funded by you and I can't continue to make them without your support. So if you get any value out of the videos that I create and you want me to be able to create more, Please support me on Patreon or Substack via the links below.

On Patreon, I do bonus episodes, monthly Q&A live streams, and post frequent updates about my work. My Substack newsletter gives you a bi-weekly roundup of everything that I'm seeing and reading and paying attention to online. You can also get my newsletter on Patreon. Once again, the links to everything are below in the description. Every dollar of your support makes such a difference.

It feels like he's always just been so spiritually anthropic. Why didn't he work at Anthropic? Like when he was ousted, maybe we'll never know, but like, why wouldn't he just go there and play for the other team? That is a really great question. My understanding is that he was considering it. When he was at Open AI, he had started working on his situational awareness manifesto, which was obviously the 165 page essay that like blew up and helped him raise money for his fun. Well, let's get into that. Let's get into the manifesto because you're right.

This is when I learned who he was because this absolutely blew up. So explain what situational awareness is. What does it say and why it was so significant? My understanding of situational awareness, I guess the way he used it in the essay was like, AI is advancing so rapidly faster than most of the world can really comprehend. And like, if you live in San Francisco, you're part of the labs, you see the research, you see how fast it's going.

You have like situational awareness about how fast things are going to change. And like how quickly the world is going to get disrupting. by like all-powerful AI. It's like a very AGI-I-pill, classic kind of text that you would imagine anyone who is really steeped in like the research culture of AI, what they would think, right? Like the idea like AI is going to enter into recursive self-intelligence

where they improve on their own and like, will exceed the intelligence of humans and, you know, we might not be able to control it. He was like, very few people have that situational awareness that this is where the world is headed. And that was kind of his thesis. Like, we need the world. to wake up to the fact and have the situational awareness about like how quickly the technology

is evolving and like what we need to do to make sure it develops in a safe way. So he publishes this and I feel like it just blew up. I did not read the whole thing. I'll be real. It was too long. But like I did follow all the discourse and it wasn't new. Like you said, I don't know. A lot of it seems like just regurgitated like stuff that you hear from research communities,

anthropic safety-poiled people. But I feel like it came. at this time, maybe because it was like 2024. It was two years after Chat TPD. It like hit at this time right when people were starting to really consider this stuff. And I think the media was starting to consider it and like finance people were starting. So I feel like it was just sort of like right place, right time. And he's this like really weird looking like 24 year old guy.

Like I think part of it is also like who it was coming from. Yes, I agree with all of that. I think it was just, it was very zeitgeisty. It was a manifesto. You know, I think whenever there's like a movement, Right, like AI is very ideological and it's a movement, right? People who believe, who are EGI pills, who believe we're headed into this new uncertain future. And I think he just kind of crystallized a lot of the sentiments that people had about the technology and how to think about it.

And it obviously helped that he was able to kind of advance a very convincing investment thesis. Well, so very quickly, you know, this manifesto turns into basically, yeah, an investment thesis. and he starts raising money for this fund. I mean, Wall Street around this time also has become fascinated with AI and feeling like they're behind. And I feel like it's like here you have this young tech savant who wears a quarter zip and can maybe speak to investors. So what was the sort of thesis behind this investment vehicle? They invested in public and private companies all kind of related to AI. So in the public markets like infrastructure, semiconductors, they also shorted stocks.

They thought would be disrupted by AI. In the private markets, they invested in a lot of money in Anthropic Fluidstack, which is like a data center-ish company. So it was very much based on a very bold and aggressive thesis that AI will like, you know, take over the world. And like there will be a class of companies that are AI native and survive and flourish. And then companies that will get disrupted by AI. So in some sense, it wasn't like a super, you know, sophisticated thesis by any sense. right? But I think the fact, yeah, like you were saying, the fact that he was kind of seen as like this oracle of AI. And I think the fact that he was obviously worked at OpenAI and was dating Abital.

People knew he was very connected to like the anthropic world. So a lot of people, you know, are very suspicious that he's like insider trading because he's now married to someone who like knows everything about anthropic. Right. But at the very least, his LPs knew that he was trusted that he was connected and, kind of a part of the zeitgeist. So yeah, I think that's how he raised a lot of money for the fund. Yeah. And, you know, as you report in your story, it did well for a while. You wrote that the fund had gained about 270% after fees through this year through May. It was up more than a thousand percent after fees since its inception. It had ballooned to well over 20 billion under management, which is the size of a lot of other big hedge funds. You know, Jane Street invested,

also very kind of EA, I guess. That's where Sam Bank been freed. worked. The tech and finance world are all like one degree away from each other, I feel. Yeah. And I didn't fully realize that Jane Street had that kind of EA past. Because they were the, I think they're one of the first big, like, institutional LPs to back the fund and kind of lend that like Wall Street credibility to it. So I feel like he just becomes this kind of like wonderkind where like he just, I feel like a lot of tech people looked at him as, yeah, super knowledge about sort of where AI is going. He's also a. very in the zeit guys. I mean, he's friends with Dwar Keshe, the like podcaster, who everyone listens to is another Zoomer.

Like all these people kind of exist to like hype the AI industry, I feel like. Yeah. And it is kind of crazy. Like he's, I think people forget he's only 24 years old and he had no prior investing experience. And he's managing $20 billion. Yes. He got a lot of Silicon, a lot of Wall Street people like invested like individuals and Jane Street. And so, but yeah, he was like 23 or 22 when he started it and like had not. no investing experience. Banks were like lending him all this money to increase his exposure. It was like a highly risk on approach to investing. It's just crazy. Like he's not like some veteran who is to my knowledge, like highly skilled that you had a great track record to prove that he knows how to invest in the right way. So which is like I think it's such a funny like contrast between Wall Street investing style and Silicon Valley investing style.

Because in Silicon Valley, it's actually totally normal to give some random 22-year-old with no experience, like millions and millions, if not billions of dollars. But in the Wall Street world, I feel like these institutional investors look for more of a track record generally and they don't like to fund that way. And so I feel like the AI stuff had them feeling like they were on their back foot. And so suddenly they're willing to like engage in this more maybe risky strategy. But they signed up all these big banks to kind of execute their trades, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America. and borrowing lots of money, right, to kind of like get this financing power. So surprise, surprise. It doesn't work out like wonderfully because as recently as July, it seemed like everything was

okay. And then suddenly here we are, you know, in the beginning of August and things have kind of changed. So what happened? Yes. And I will caveat this. I don't normally cover the role of hedge funds. So, but I think I can do my best to describe what happens.

So highly over-lovered. So I think for every dollar that he had, he was borrowing, the fund was borrowing three or four dollars to invest in companies. So taking on a lot of risk, right, because you have to pledge collateral whenever you take on debt to invest. And basically what happened was that a lot of AI stocks tanked, I think, starting maybe like mid-July, right, because of like all the advances from the Chinese AI models and just like markets being unpredictable. Like there was just like a big sell-off in AI-related stocks. And so he just became overexposed. There were margin calls, right? Like whenever the value of your collateral goes down,

you need to find a way to shore up your finances to like keep your lend, prevent your lenders from getting nervous. And he just didn't have the liquidity, right, to meet those margin calls. You know, he likened it to, I think, a run on the bank in his letter. So there's these margin calls. All of a sudden, like things start to come crashing down very quickly.

people are placing short bets against his firm's top holdings. He's selling his positions to raise cash. This is chaos, but it's also like a tale as old as time. Not exactly the same as like Sam Bickman-Fried situation, but similar. We see this on the Wall Street before. I mean, even something like Silicon Valley Bank, you can see, I guess, how these things can spiral really quickly. And that's what seems to happen.

So what does he do to mitigate the trauma and the bloodletting? So he needs to find a way to get liquidity, right, to meet these margin calls. And what ended up happening was that Citadel ends up bailing him out, right? Like they buy a large portion of his public holdings, I think, at a slight discount. And Citadel for people that don't know, this is like Ken Griffin's iconic hedge fund. It's been around this tonight. This is a very famous old school investor. And yeah, they kind of like swoop in basically, right?

And they're like, we'll bail you out and basically profit off of your disastrous situation that you've created. Exactly. And then it's very painful, right? because it allows the fund to stay alive, but the amount of assets save under management, it's a shrunken version of itself, right? Because they kind of just swooped in, saved the firm, but like bought a lot of their holdings at a discount. At one point, like on Wednesday evening, he was even thinking of selling a $3.5 billion

anthropic stake to two big VC firms in Silicon Valley, Green Oaks and Sequoia. But I think because they were able to get liquidity from the sale to Citadel, they kept their stake in Anthropic, which I think is like obviously a very lucrative. to own. So yeah, that's kind of what happened. And it was very painful for him, right? Because the fund is now very much a shrunken version of itself. It's interesting even just to read in your story about these chaotic couple days where he's trying to raise the money. He's talking to the Collison brothers, the Stripe co-founders. It seemed like he was reaching out to all these other people to try to figure out like what to do and and who could help him. And as you said,

the result is kind of funny because ultimately it's this old school Wall Street investing guy that kind of bails him out and like ultimately Ken Griffin profited off of him taking on this huge risk. And I mean, he very quickly went from this like AI darling to being like, oh, maybe this is why we don't give billions of dollars to random 22 year olds. Yeah. And it's obviously it's hindsight 2020, right? Like people love to do a post-mortem. So if you talk to a lot of catch fund Wall Street people, they're like, it's insane that

there weren't more protections in place that the fund was so risk on so overlover that all these LPs piled in without realizing that this could be a risk. But I don't know. I feel like when you're in a bubble, everything is going up into the right. And you see this guy who's young AI Wonderkind, who's like at the very center of what's going on. People just pile on, right? Like you take on risks that you normally wouldn't.

So that's why these things always happen because people kind of get too excited and then realize that it's not always up into the right. Everyone can't stop just wasting billions of dollars by like pouring it on people. As this is all happening, he's also getting married. And as you guys reported, I thought this was so funny. He was having breakout sessions at the wedding to negotiate all of this. All of this stuff is happening at the craziest time. Yes.

So that was like the most shocking thing when this all unfolded. Someone told me, oh, he's getting married this weekend. I was like, oh, my God, that's the lead of my story. He got married this weekend to Abital. They got married in Carmel. And they had a very AI EAish wedding where they had multiple breakout sessions and panels where guests would participate in these intellectual conversations. I'm still trying to figure out who was leading these panels. It seems like lots of famous Silicon Valley people and intellectuals were involved in these breakout sessions and panels.

But yeah, it's a very AI thing. EA's love to have breakout sessions where they kind of talk about very arcane or niche things. There's nothing they love more than a breakout session, I guess. And like a conference, I know, I think turning your wedding into a conference to debate big issues in tech and the philosophy is. I guess he found his match considering this is what his bride went along with as well. What does the future hold for him now? Because he's had this fall from Grace. At the same time, I already saw people tweeting, don't count Leo out, you know, I feel like they already are kind of staging him for a comeback.

What's his plan? Is he just going to end up in Anthropic? I'm sure he can maybe join him. at some point. I think, I mean, he's living to fight another day, it seems like. He still manages some assets. I think around a little more than 10 billion. He still owns very valuable. It's a private public fund, you know, he still owns the anthropic stake. He has other assets that could go back up in value. So it's not like it's like completely collapsed, right? But I think the question now is what appetite investors will have to back him in

the future, how risk on he is in his future approach to running the front. fund will it become like a black mark or will he be able to get over this? I mean, those things are all very much in the air, I think. But yeah, I mean, this is a huge black mark, like in a matter of days. A huge portion of his portfolio was just eviscerated. I also feel like he's lost a lot of social capital maybe. I mean, I guess he still has the EA's, but I feel like he's been the butt of the joke to a lot of people on tech Twitter, especially. This man is still a millionaire.

I don't want to make it seem like he, I mean, he still has this mansion in Knob Hill. still rich he's still probably never going to have to work a day in his life if he doesn't want to but it does seem like culturally people think he's kind of corny and lame and i just saw a lot of posts about him from people that are actually in silicon valley just being like he was a meme and now we're done with him hedge fund world is very interesting right because you're really publicly exposed if your portfolio goes down you can't make your margin calls you're really accountable to the whims of the stock market but he didn't really grow up in that culture right like silicon Valley, the kind of VC startup archetype is you give money to young people, it's not a big deal.

And like venture funds are famously, you can kind of hide if your portfolio is not doing well. And your LPs are never going to like demand their money back, right? That's just not how VC world works. So it almost feels like a cultural mismatch, right? Where maybe he not like forgot that he was running a hedge fund, but there's a reason why there's not a lot of hedge funds out in Silicon Valley, right? Because it's just like a very different culture. You can be an AI visionary here.

If you're a VC, you're rewarded for backing these types of people, even if they can't figure out their business. And in some sense, it's very hard to tell whether you're a success or failure until like five or ten years down the line. The stock market isn't really like that. People aren't AI pill. People are shorting AI stocks. People are like selling off AI stocks on like the most random news. So it almost feels like a cultural mismatch, right? Because his social world, Dwarquish and Dylan Patel, you know, his wife, the anthropic circles, like they all have this very future.

bullish version of view of where AI is headed. And so if you build a portfolio around that, maybe in 10 years these companies you think will be really, really huge. But the market doesn't really work like that. The market is very fickle. Like I'm sure the Collison's, the kind of Silicon Valley people who invested in him, they all stand by him. There's no way they cancel someone like that.

Because in Silicon Valley, it's always about like your proximity to wealth. And you invests in things you think will give you access to the right people. And he very much is still in that zeitgeist, right? It's not like he's going to get burned by people in this world, at least. So it'll be interesting to see he's only 24. So what is his next chapter with the fund and beyond? I'm very interested to see what happens. Yeah, me too.

I think probably he won't be going to Wall Street again anytime soon, but I could picture him doing a lot more in Silicon Valley. Like you said, Silicon Valley, it's all about relationships and proximity to power. And it's a lot of. of soft power in a way that like New York finance especially is not because they are very like show me the money. I don't care. I want to get paid. I don't care what weird ideas you have about the future. I just care about monetizing or like finding this little point of arbitrage. Whereas in SF it's so about philosophical alignment and future beliefs. So yeah, I imagine he'll

just sort of retreat to his mansion and come back richer than ever, unfortunately. I don't know. We'll see. Or there will be some other 19 year old coming up. to take his place that somehow even more AGI-I-pilled. Yes. I mean, one thing also I should have mentioned is that he did run the fund with someone called Carl Schulman, who was a more experienced investor. He worked for one of Peter Thiel's hedge funds back in the day, but also steeped in the effect of altruism community. So he did kind of have like a grown-up who is running the fund with him, but and I think Carl provided like a more professional veneer to the fund.

That's like, here's your adult babysitter, who by the way, also conveniently believe, all your weird EA ideology. But it still doesn't take away from the fact that he was the main guy running this hedge fund at age 24 with no prior investing experience. He didn't even work on like the finance side at OpenAI. He was working on super alignment, which is like the most wacky. It's very far away from the world of investing. So I feel like there's definitely, there's more to do to like figure out how he got started,

like when he decided he actually wanted to run a hedge fund. Because my sense is that he had been kind of playing around with the idea, even when he was at Open AI. Yeah, I mean, this is a guy that's like clearly very smart, graduated from Columbia at 19. He was bragging about his like near perfect LSAT score, I guess, on his LinkedIn. So like, maybe he considered law school. I don't know. He's clearly a smart guy, but that doesn't always translate. And I guess like it's hard to turn down a lot of money. So I can imagine like he dipped his toes into this, but maybe he'll go more in the like philosophical world next or try to,

I don't know, do something where it's not so focused on like returns and like you said, like hard finance, because he might just be more in that kind of realm. Like it's almost like his philosophy on AI. It would have been well suited to be a VC, right? Because, you know, like founders would really like he has great standing amongst like the AI research community. Like a lot of researchers from opening AI and Anthropic would like go to happy hours that he hosted. He has the right connections, right? Like in in BC you kind of make these like very bullish bets, a lot of which don't play out obviously.

So it's interesting that he went the hedge fund route because, you know, dispositionally almost like you would almost have expected him to be more in the world of like venture investing. But we'll see. I mean, I'm very interested to see like what happens from here on. Lesson to the kids, raise a venture fund, not a hedge fund if you want to squander billions of dollars. River, thank you so much for joining me to break down this story and all your reporting. Of course. It was really fun. All right.

That's it for this week's episode of Power User. If you like my work, please, please buy a paid subscription to my substack at usermag.co. That's usermag.com or support me on Patreon via the link below. On my Patreon and substack, I do bonus episodes, regular live streams. I take direct requests from my supporters on what to cover, and you'll help ensure that I can remain an independent journalist. Thanks so much, and I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. See you then.