Saturday marked the union of AI’s youngest power couple: 24-year-old hedge fund billionaire Leopold Aschenbrenner and 27-year-old Rhodes scholar turned Anthropic chief of staff Avital Balwit. In preparation for the Carmel-by-the-Sea event, held at a private estate resembling a Tuscan villa looming over the Pacific, the couple asked guests to brainstorm investment ideas that they would then pitch in breakout groups as a fun (??) networking activity to start the weekend.

The unusual assignment struck an even darker tone in light of the news two days before the wedding that Aschenbrenner had sold the majority of Situational Awareness’s highly leveraged portfolio of AI-infrastructure stocks to Ken Griffin’s Citadel at a 10% discount, and, at one point, considered offloading a chunk of the company’s private Anthropic stocks to meet a margin call. His choice was probably wise given his proximity to Dario Amodei, who nevertheless reportedly did not attend the wedding. According to Fortune, Aschenbrenner has promised investors that he will be available throughout this week, supposedly the week of his honeymoon, for calls. The wedding went on as planned (minus the investment brainstorming sessions).

I’m Clara Molot, filling in for Julia Black.

Mentioned in this issue: Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, Ken Griffin, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Avital Balwit, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Capital One, Google, SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Situational Awareness, Citadel, and more…

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