Inside the Wedding That Went Ahead After the Groom’s Hedge Fund Lost $30 Billion
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s wedding in Carmel-by-the-Sea was meant to be a celebration of the moment — a 24-year-old wunderkind with a hot AI hedge fund, surrounded by the richest and most influential names in Silicon Valley. Instead, it became one of the most awkward weekends in recent tech finance history.
Days before the ceremony, Aschenbrenner’s $45 billion fund, Situational Awareness, had fallen apart, with losses of more than $30 billion and rising. Many of the 80 to 100 guests who gathered for the multi-day festivities were investors in the fund. Still, the wedding went ahead, with guests sipping Napa Valley wine while a DJ played a Berghain-style set inspired by Aschenbrenner’s German roots. The night ended early, with attendees calling it a day around 11 p.m.
The elephant in the room was impossible to ignore. Networking sessions originally planned to spark discussions about investment ideas and AI trends were quietly reworked into conversations about life and philosophy. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, whose company had been one of the fund’s key private holdings, 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.
Aschenbrenner had spent the days before the nuptials trying to contain the damage. The Wall Street Journal reported that he had agreed to sell about $3.5 billion of the fund’s private stake in Anthropic to venture capital investors in an effort to avoid a massive margin call. Then, in a last-minute reversal, the deal was scrapped after Ken Griffin’s Citadel agreed to buy the bulk of the fund’s public equity portfolio, giving Aschenbrenner another source of liquidity.
The fund’s collapse marked a brutal turn for a founder whose trajectory had been steep and highly visible. The German national graduated as Columbia University’s valedictorian at 19, co-founded an effective altruism club, and later worked at FTX, where he met Balwit, his future wife. After FTX imploded and Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges, Aschenbrenner joined OpenAI while Balwit landed at Anthropic as CEO Dario Amodei’s chief of staff.
Aschenbrenner’s time at OpenAI ended in April 2024 after he was fired for allegedly sharing sensitive internal information with Holden Karnofsky, whose wife works at Anthropic. Aschenbrenner has said the document had already been reviewed for sensitive information and that sharing it with outside researchers for feedback was “totally normal.”
He went on to publish a 165-page manifesto, Situational Awareness, in 2024, and then launched a hedge fund under the same name. His thesis was simple: AI fortunes would not be made from chatbots but from the chips, memory, data centers, electricity, cooling, and networking powering them. The fund raised $100 million in November 2024, attracted a cult-like following, and saw fees reportedly surge more than 1,000%, with rivals rushing to copy his trades, according to The New York Times.
Blockbuster returns, however, came with blockbuster risk. The fund used leverage of up to four times its capital, CNBC reported. When AI stocks turned sour, relatively modest declines were enough to trigger margin calls that threatened to unwind the entire firm.
For those in Carmel, the wedding became an odd coda to a fund that had symbolized the euphoria around AI markets. The celebration proceeded without visible cost-cutting, even as the public accounting of a $30 billion loss had only just begun. The bride and groom got their wedding. The guests got a front-row seat to how quickly money can disappear when leverage and concentrated bets meet a correction — and a reminder that in the AI boom, the only certainty is volatility.