a 24 year old raised $225M turned it into $5.5B in under 12 months and outperformed the S&P 500 by 8x OpenAI fired him for seeing it coming be @leopoldasch - full name leopold aschenbrenner - born 2001 in germany. parents were both doctors - attended john f. kennedy school in berlin - graduated valedictorian from columbia university at 19 - triple major. economics, mathematics, statistics - co-founded columbia's effective altruism chapter while doing it the early career: - 2021: research on economic growth at oxford's global priorities institute - 2022: joined ftx future fund. resigned before the collapse - watched $32 billion evaporate from the inside. got out clean OpenAI: - 2023: joins openai as a researcher on the superalignment team - working directly under ilya sutskever and jan leike - april 2024: fired for allegedly leaking sensitive information - his version: they were internal memos sent to the board - openai's version: confidentiality breach - response: wrote a 165-page essay predicting the next decade of AI - didn't start a podcast. didn't go on a press tour - just wrote the thesis and went to work the fund: - mid 2024: founds situational awareness LP - raises $225 million - patrick and john collison from stripe write the check - nat friedman former github ceo writes the check - daniel gross writes the check - these aren't random angels. these are people who can read a 165-page AI thesis and know when someone's right what he actually did with $225M: - ignored nvidia. everyone owns nvidia - ignored the obvious plays - asked one question: what does AI actually need to run - answer: energy and compute - bloom energy: $885 million position - one position. 20% of the entire fund - bloom makes portable energy turbines for data centers - when everyone was buying chips he was buying the power plants - coreweave: $700 million total position - added $300M to an existing bet - someone has to run the GPUs - he made sure that someone owed him - core scientific: owns 10% - bitcoin mining infrastructure being repurposed for AI data centers - cipher. bitdeer. same thesis - stranded compute looking for a new job - shorted infosys - betting that claude code and codex replace outsourced IT work - not a speculative short. a structural one - he's right - dumped nvidia and intel - when everyone was buying he was rotating out - saw the commodity trap before it closed the results: - fund up $1.5 billion in the last 3 months - +35% last quarter alone - $225 million became $5.5 billion - outperformed the S&P 500 by 8x in the first 6 months he's 24 openai fired him for knowing too much he raised $225M on a 165-page essay found the one thing everyone ignored: AI runs on energy not just chips and turned it into one of the best performing funds of the decade they fired him for seeing the future he just went and bet on it the essay was the pitch deck
