The 24-Year-Old Betting $9Billion Against the AI Boom (Leopold Aschenbrenner)

In 2024, this guy got publicly fired from OpenAI . [music] Two years later, he runs around $9 billion starting from just $225 million , and he's just 24 years [music] old . He's just made one of the most aggressive bets on Wall Street , putting billions of dollars against Nvidia , the single most important company of the entire AI boom . And here's what makes that insane . [music] He's not an AI skeptic . He might be the most bullish person alive on it . He thinks [music] superhuman machines or AGI are landing within a few years , and he's still betting against the chip stocks [music] everyone owns . The story of how he got here is even wilder than the bet itself , [music] and buried in it is a lesson about spotting the thing that the market hasn't woken up to yet . His name is Leopold Aschenbrenner . He's German from Berlin . He showed up at Columbia University at 15 and walked out at 19 as a valedictorian, the highest-ranking scholar of his college . Then, in 2023, at 22, he joined OpenAI . Not the marketing team , the super alignment team, the group whose job it was to work out how to keep AI under control once it got smarter than us . So, when he talks about where this is heading , he's not a finance guy who read some headlines . He was inside the building . Then, in April 2024, OpenAI fired him , and the two sides do not agree why . His version? He'd written a memo warning the company that foreign spies, China specifically, could steal its most valuable secrets, and that its security was nowhere near good enough . He shared it with a couple of board members