Skip to content
Sign in
Artwork for Patrick Boyle On Finance
Patrick Boyle On Finance · Tuesday · 39 min

Does Leopold Have Situational Awareness?

Last week, 24-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner — former FTX staffer, ex-OpenAI researcher, and author of the viral 165-page essay "Situational Awareness" — managed to lose roughly two-thirds of his $45 billion hedge fund in a matter of weeks. The margin calls arrived during his wedding weekend.In this video I break down how a trader with no professional experience raised billions from Silicon Valley, why his AI "hedge" wasn't a hedge at all, and how leverage plus a concentrated bet on artificial intelligence stocks turned a great-looking expected return into a catastrophic outcome. Along the way we look at the cultural gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street, why Ken Griffin's Citadel ended up buying the collapsing portfolio in an overnight fire sale, and the maths of volatility drag — the reason a high expected return can still drag an investor's typical outcome straight into the ground.It's a story about leverage, risk management, expected versus median returns, and what happens when you go "full Kelly." Featuring reporting from the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times, plus Victor Haghani's lessons from The Missing Billionaires.

0:00-39:37
Play in podnod

transcript

No transcript — this publisher did not publish one.

show notes

Last week, 24-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner — former FTX staffer, ex-OpenAI researcher, and author of the viral 165-page essay "Situational Awareness" — managed to lose roughly two-thirds of his $45 billion hedge fund in a matter of weeks. The margin calls arrived during his wedding weekend.In this video I break down how a trader with no professional experience raised billions from Silicon Valley, why his AI "hedge" wasn't a hedge at all, and how leverage plus a concentrated bet on artificial intelligence stocks turned a great-looking expected return into a catastrophic outcome. Along the way we look at the cultural gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street, why Ken Griffin's Citadel ended up buying the collapsing portfolio in an overnight fire sale, and the maths of volatility drag — the reason a high expected return can still drag an investor's typical outcome straight into the ground.It's a story about leverage, risk management, expected versus median returns, and what happens when you go "full Kelly." Featuring reporting from the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times, plus Victor Haghani's lessons from The Missing Billionaires.

more episodes

All episodes