Leopold Aschenbrenner is getting married this weekend in Carmel, California to Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Fortune first reported their engagement in October. It is, the Wall Street Journal reports, a lavish affair fit for the AI power couple: beginning, naturally, with a colloquium of panels and breakouts, a ceremony at a Tuscan-style villa, and a send-off to their honeymoon at a forest spa retreat.
But the groom is set to tie the knot after having spent this entire week desperate to keep his fund afloat.
The 20-something became known as the “Nostradamus” of AI after building his hedge fund, Situational Awareness, to $45 billion in capital on a concentrated bet on hot memory chip and data center names, like CoreWeave and SK Hynix. The Journal reports he was leveraged three to four times on these bets, borrowing three to four dollars for every dollar of capital.
For two years that worked. But in the week of Aschenbrenner’s wedding, a black swan event came. As traders agitated over all the AI infrastructure spending without clear returns, they pushed memory stocks and even Big Tech names like SK Hynix and SanDisk down by 30%. The semiconductor sector even had its worst month since 2002. Rival traders figured out what he owned and shorted it, the Journal reported, betting that he would have to sell. The pressure continued: banks began demanding more collateral, so he sold stock to meet the calls, only pushing prices down further. In a Thursday letter to investors, which Reuters first reported, Aschenbrenner compared it to a bank run—”vulnerability begetting more vulnerability.”
