All In On Aschenbrenner

It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.

America's past time can teach us a lot about ourselves. A season is 162 games, more than any other sport in the world. It's less about any single night and more about who you are across a whole summer. There’s one thing it can’t teach us though. How to remember.

See, we remember the last game. We remember the ring. We remember the champagne. We forget the season that led up to it. And certainly nobody remembers second place.

There's a certain kind of person the internet does the same thing to.

Leopold Aschenbrenner is this year's hot topic.

Here’s his resume:

• Moved to the United States at 15

• Graduated Valedictorian of Columbia at 19

• Research stint at Oxford

• FTX Future Fund

• OpenAI Superalignment

After his departure from OpenAI, he published a 165 page thesis titled Situational Awareness. And it raised money. Fast.

Aschenbrenner launched a hedge fund built around that essay's thesis. Within a year it posted returns north of 400%.

But here’s where public opinion starts to get diluted. This is not a lucky guy who stumbled into a hot trade. Cracked people do cracked things, and they do them repeatedly.

The hedge fund isn't the first time he's been the smartest person in the room. It's just the first time it came with a P&L attached.

As the story goes, it all came crashing down.

With borrowed leverage as high as 4-to-1, long and short bets on both sides of the AI aisle, and a margin call cascade, Situational Awareness fell from $45 billion in assets to about $10 billion in a matter of days. Citadel picked up the wreckage at a discount and the headlines wrote themselves: Leopold Aschenbrenner is the new Sam Bankman-Fried.

Except he's not. He's up roughly 80% on the year. Even after the worst month of his career, even after being forced to sell almost everything he owned at the worst possible moment, his year-end is still absurdly high.

Go back to the season for a second. A team can play 162 games of the best baseball anyone's seen and still get remembered for nothing if they choke in October. It doesn’t erase that they played great baseball.

Aschenbrenner’s got a new version of the same problem. Outcome overwrites process. That little detail is buried under every article about the collapse because "Genius Still Up 80% After Historic Blowup" doesn’t sell like "Wonderkid Loses It All."

None of this means the leverage wasn't dumb. For someone with the experience he accrued, he should've known better. But rather than step back and lick his wounds, Aschenbrenner dumped $400 million into a new private bet. He holds an undying belief in his thesis.

And despite the public thrashing, I trust him. At nineteen he was valedictorian of an Ivy League school most people spend four years trying to survive. Then Oxford. Then FTX. Then OpenAI. His thesis moved an entire industry before he'd managed a cent of anyone's money. He didn't catch five separate lucky breaks, because opportunity doesn't just correlate with consistent excellence. It demands it.

You can quote me now. He didn’t win the World Series this year, but Leopold Aschenbrenner will be back soon to raise the pot, and when he does, I call.