Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 24-year-old AI whiz kid and fund manager, went viral for supposedly turning $225M into $5.5B:
Breaking: OpenAI fired Leopold Aschenbrenner at 22. Three years later, he manages $5.5 billion.
Timeline:
• Age 19: Graduates Columbia as valedictorian
• Age 22: Joins OpenAI's Superalignment team
• Age 22: Fired for raising AI safety concerns
• Age 23: Publishes viral… pic.twitter.com/QM0ETyYrmm— Michael Burry Stock Tracker ♟ (@burrytracker) March 5, 2026
He didn’t actually turn $225M into $5.5B. This is people confusing inflows with return on capital. AUM grows as outside investors add money to his fund. Actual investor returns, from those who have already invested, are obviously going to be much less, and even worse after factoring in management fees. More confusingly, he uses calls and puts to create synthetic long or short positions of certain stocks, and he has both calls and puts on Coreweave.
Moreover, his fund has only been around for a year, so it’s way too early to assess long-term performance or viability of his strategy. His fund is “net long” on AI. But given how the Nasdaq 100 has been flat over the past 9 months, and major recent declines of his largest holding (e.g. Core Scientific Inc, Intel Inc, CoreWeave Inc, IREN Ltd), it’s hard to imagine 2026 has gone well so far. One of his major long holdings, Vistra Corp, has been flat for the past year. Applied Digital did well, but it’s only a 4% of his holdings.
His put options on Nvidia would not have hedged, given how Nvidia stock has been flat the past 9 months. Same for his put options on SMH (VanEck Semiconductor ETF). SMH is up a lot over the past year. In addition, his synthetic approach of using call/put options would incur a lot of ‘time delay’, hurting returns even more.
Meanwhile, I am up a lot for 2026 by shorting Bitcoin, in addition to big gains for 2025 with a combination of shorting Bitcoin and tech positions. Everyone but myself missed out on the shorting Bitcoin trade. In mid-2025, I made the bold call to short Bitcoin as a hedge against my tech stock exposure. This involved changing my method from shorting Bitcoin sporadically to shorting it 24-7, which was a major tailwind throughout 2025–2026.
Almost all of my ‘alpha’ since from 2025 onward was from shorting Bitcoin. Longer term, I personally achieved a CAGR of roughly 33% since 2014 (about 11 years), which is arguably in the top tier of all money managers, if not the best. A good chunk of this was from tech investments.
Warren Buffett or Soros are often cited as close seconds, but the former was never really a hedge fund manager except very early in his career, prior to acquiring Berkshire Hathaway. Jim Simons passed away a couple of years ago at 88, and Soros and Buffett are in their mid-90s, leaving open the question of who can hold the distinction of being the greatest. As mentioned in the post, no one else was saying to short Bitcoin, to buy tech stocks, and that AI was not a bubble.