Tech bros lavish wedding plans forced to make handbrake turn as $30 billion loss hits hard

AI prodigy Leopold Aschenbrenner’s wedding weekend brought together a who’s who of Silicon Valley money and influence for a multi-day celebration.But there was a big elephant in room: just days before, the 24-year-old’s $45 billion hedge fund, Situational Awareness, had imploded, suffering losses of more than $30 billion, and mounting.Many of the 80 to 100 Silicon Valley heavyweights who turned up for the lavish Carmel-by-the-Sea ceremony were investors in Aschenbrenner’s fund.Guests had been invited to networking sessions meant to spark conversations about investment ideas and AI trends.But in what can only be described as peak Bay Area tech culture, these sessions were quietly reworked from bullish market discussions, to sessions about life and philosophy.Still, the fund’s collapse didn’t derail the festivities.The wedding went ahead, with attendees sipping Napa Valley wine while a DJ spun a Berghain-style set inspired by Aschenbrenner’s German roots, before calling it a night at just 11 p.m.Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei reportedly did not attend.“It wasn’t like Aschenbrenner went broke and couldn’t pay for the venue or the caterer,” one person familiar with the wedding told Vanity Fair.The tech billionaire struck a deal to offload about $3.5 billion worth of the fund’s private stake in Anthropic to a group of venture capital investors in an effort to avoid a massive margin call, according to The Wall Street Journal.Then in a last-minute handbrake turn, the deal was scrapped after Ken Griffin’s Citadel agreed to buy the bulk of the fund’s public equity portfolio, giving the firm another source of liquidity.Aschenbrenner’s rise has been just as dramatic as his fund’s recent troubles.The German national graduated as Columbia University’s valedictorian at 19, co-founding an effective altruism club.Aschenbrenner became a darling of the tech world after publishing his 165-page manifesto, Situational Awareness, in 2024.He launched a hedge ...