How the ‘Nostradamus of AI’ Got It Wrong

**Ryan Knutson** (0:05)
Last week, there was a wedding.
The setting, a coastal town in Northern California. How big of an affair was this going to be?

**Gregory Zuckerman** (0:18)
This was the event of the Silicon Valley summer. There were all kinds of top AI and other tech investors and executives coming.
It was sort of the place to be. You wanted to see and be seen there.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:36)
The bride was the chief of staff to the CEO of Anthropic. And the groom was an investing wonderkind named Leopold Aschenbrenner.
So if I had asked you a month ago, who is Leopold Aschenbrenner? How would you answer that question?

**Gregory Zuckerman** (0:53)
A month ago, there was a consensus that Leo Aschenbrenner was a Nostradamus of some sorts, of the AI age.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:02)
Our colleague Gregory Zuckerman covers business and investing.

**Gregory Zuckerman** (1:05)
He was young, made predictions, some of them seemed to come true. He had vision, people deferred to him, so they gave him a lot of money.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:15)
Aschenbrenner is 24 years old. And just days before his wedding, he was running a hedge fund worth $45 billion.
But this was not, like, also a normal wedding. Right, there was, like, some other features.

**Gregory Zuckerman** (1:30)
It wasn't the kind of wedding that many of us experienced. There were no gifts, for one. He didn't need the gifts. And there were breakout sessions, sort of like a conference or Ted Talk kind of thing. There were interesting people, smart people gonna be there. You want to hear from them.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:46)
It was like a wedding slash business conference.

**Gregory Zuckerman** (1:49)
Yeah, there were colloquiums. So it sounds like a fun, interesting kind of event. I would have liked to have been invited.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:56)
But in the lead up to the grand event, there was some serious trouble brewing for Aschebrenner's fund.

**Gregory Zuckerman** (2:02)
Bit of an understatement.
So he was counting down to his wedding as for the guests and his beautiful bride. But behind the scenes, his hedge fund was melting down, was collapsing, was imploding.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:16)
So your hedge fund melting down, is that worse than rain on your wedding day?

**Gregory Zuckerman** (2:22)
It's a little bit worse.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:24)
Investors thought Aschebrenner was kind of clairvoyant, that he could guide them through a confusing time. But it turned out, Aschebrenner made a textbook mistake, that brought his mighty hedge fund crashing down. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Tuesday, August 4th.
Coming up on the show, what the Nostradamus of AI got wrong.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:05)
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**Ryan Knutson** (4:14)
Before he was anointed as an investing prodigy, Leopold Aschenbrenner had a resume that looked tailor-made for a career in the tech world.

**Gregory Zuckerman** (4:23)
So Leo Aschenbrenner grew up in Germany, came to Columbia University, did exceedingly well in school.
He subsequently put on his LinkedIn. He was proud that his LSAT score was like better than 99.4 percent, I think, of every other score. He was proud of that. I personally have not listed my SAT scores, shared them in many years.

**Ryan Knutson** (4:45)
I personally will not share my SAT scores.

**Leopold Aschenbrenner** (4:47)
That too, right.

**Ryan Knutson** (4:50)
After college, Aschenbrenner moved from one buzzy startup to another.

**Gregory Zuckerman** (4:55)
He worked at among the most important and influential and controversial companies out there. He worked at FTX, the Sam Bankman-freed startup, which became a crypto power.

**Ryan Knutson** (5:07)
And then imploded.

**Gregory Zuckerman** (5:08)
And then imploded, right.

**SPEAKER_6** (5:10)
Tonight, the cryptocurrency world is reeling after the meltdown of one of its most popular trading platforms.