The saga of Leopold Aschenbrenner, a 24-year-old hedge-fund manager who parlayed an essay about artificial intelligence into Situational Awareness LP, a fund managing tens of billions of dollars — until the shit hit the fan, days before his wedding — has captivated Wall Street for weeks.

We’re still learning more about both Aschenbrenner’s 11th-hour attempts to salvage the fund and the scope of the fallout. Reuters reported Friday that one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, Jane Street Capital, lost billions of dollars last month as a result of its investment in Situational Awareness, and in a letter to clients, it specifically blamed Aschenbrenner’s firm.

On Monday night, The Wall Street Journal reported that a deal with several firms to save the fund had been scrapped at the last minute for a better offer, infuriating investors who got the call from the 24-year-old.

If you’re just tuning in, you may have questions, up to and including, Who is Leopold Aschenbrenner? Where did he get his start? Why did people give him ungodly sums of money? And does he still believe in love? Herewith, a primer.

He’s young — like can’t-rent-a-car-yet young

Aschenbrenner grew up in Berlin and came to the U.S. when he enrolled at Columbia University at the tender age of 15. At 19, he graduated as the valedictorian of the class of 2021, and while his exact birth date is unclear, it seems he has not yet turned 25, i.e., the age at which a person’s prefrontal cortex — which helps regulate self-control and decision-making — has fully developed.

His first boss is in prison, and he was fired from his second job

Having briefly considered, as so many do, just going to law school, Aschenbrenner declined a spot at Yale. Instead, he went to work at FTX, the crypto brokerage whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is currently doing 25 years in federal prison for fraud. (At FTX, Aschenbrenner worked, per the New York Times, on effective altruism, “a controversial means of using data to optimize charitable giving.”) After FTX imploded, Aschenbrenner joined OpenAI; in April 2024,........

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