The discourse on this is way too clearly schadenfreude. He's still up significantly YTD.
Investors in Situational Awareness deserved to lose their shirts
31–40 of 72 posts
Re: Investors in Situational Awareness deserved to lose their shirts
#32> Good for Mr Aschenbrenner for chancing his arm. The mystery is what on earth his investors were thinking. Perhaps they weren’t. In which case, that would be more worrying than anything about Situational Awareness’s humbling. The Economist should change its name to The Populist with this type of screed. Here's the reality: 1. Lots of money is invested willy-nilly for all sorts of reasons (or no reason at all) in all…
> this failure wasn't all that special
>> people who will lose money investing in this fund are the type of people who have a full wardrobe
If Citadel hadn't bailed him out, Situational Awareness very likely could have triggered a cascade of fire sales. That would not only hurt ordinary investors' positions, it could have also triggered a credit or even banking crisis (depending on how the margin loans are held).
A big, leveraged, concentrated fund blowing up isn't novel. But it's the traditional way to start a recession.
Re: Investors in Situational Awareness deserved to lose their shirts
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
why does involvement with EA imply being ethically challenged? i’m personally not involved, but on its face it seems better than not doing any kind of charitable work.
> why does involvement with EA imply being ethically challenged? Because almost everyone prominent in the movement has had some combination of lack of judgment and morals. There various terms for rationally pursuing philanthropy; associating with effective altruism involves embracing its ideas, people and culture.
And yet they do more good than the moral critics do.
Re: Investors in Situational Awareness deserved to lose their shirts
#34> By July this year he was said to be overseeing as much as $45bn Does anyone know if this refers to AUM or the gross size of his positions after leverage?
AUM.
Oversee: to be in charge of how an amount of money is invested or spent.
Re: Investors in Situational Awareness deserved to lose their shirts
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
As per the article, he formed a trading company without any background in investing, and once his investments tanked, he sold the stocks for pennies on the dollar to a financial firm, leaving investors holding the bag while pocketing trading fees associated with a $45B USD portfolio.
How is effective altruism related? I skimmed their wiki page [1], but didn't find anything endorsing such actions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
Sam Bankman-Fried is an effective altruist (or was anyways, not sure what he is after they denounced him). The list of effective altruists reads like a who's who of scummy people.
Re: Investors in Situational Awareness deserved to lose their shirts
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why does involvement with EA imply being ethically challenged? Because almost everyone prominent in the movement has had some combination of lack of judgment and morals. There various terms for rationally pursuing philanthropy; associating with effective altruism involves embracing its ideas, people and culture.
And yet they do more good than the moral critics do.
> yet they do more good than the moral critics do
Going to need a good source for that crowd having done more good than the frauds of even just their most-notorious members.
Masquerading as an altruist to justify massive management fees for running a fund of concentrated, leveraged positions is one of the oldest lipsticks on financial pigs.
Re: Investors in Situational Awareness deserved to lose their shirts
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Effective Altruism is one of those things that sounds smart on the surface, but in practice is a yellow flag. The fact that he started the club is a red flag. In short, Effective Altruism says you don't engage in charity until you have sufficient means to actually make a difference. Basically, you leverage capitalism to accumulate enough wealth to actually be able to solve a big problem, then you go all in on solving…
can you support those claims?
It’s the “tractability” part of the ITN framework: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/itn-framework
In practice, it can be used as a fully-general counterargument to supporting most charities, since decisively and completely solving problems in this space is rare. It’s harder to split a problem into component parts than it is to throw up one’s hands and say, “well, this isn’t tractable.”
Re: Investors in Situational Awareness deserved to lose their shirts
#38> By July this year he was said to be overseeing as much as $45bn Does anyone know if this refers to AUM or the gross size of his positions after leverage?
AUM. Oversee: to be in charge of how an amount of money is invested or spent.
> Oversee: to be in charge of how an amount of money is invested or spent
No. "Oversee" can refer to the gross or net position. If I raise $10bn and use that to buy $100bn in assets, I absolutely control and thus oversee the latter.
Re: Investors in Situational Awareness deserved to lose their shirts
#39> He reported returns of 439% for the first half of 2026 > which posted a loss of 67% in July So it's still up 44% this year? The article notes this, but seems unnecessarily adversarial against an investor who is still wildly successful.
> it's still up 44% this year? Devil is in the details of what Citadel paid for its positions, whether there are any performance tails/clawbacks, how and when the GP charges fees, et cetera . Aschenbrenner is almost certainly up. I'd be surprised if his median LP is breaking even.
yeah, especially given that the bulk of that is supposedly Anthropic which is just paper gains that could evaporate when traded publicly. everyone's a genius in a bull market, my fund is up 145% ytd after the big 50% drawdown this June.
Re: Investors in Situational Awareness deserved to lose their shirts
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why does involvement with EA imply being ethically challenged? Because almost everyone prominent in the movement has had some combination of lack of judgment and morals. There various terms for rationally pursuing philanthropy; associating with effective altruism involves embracing its ideas, people and culture.
And yet they do more good than the moral critics do.
Moral critics save a lot of lives by not doing. Sometimes not doing is the best moral option ex. I will not kill or I will not exploit.
And it does not come cheap. Someone who says "I will not work for Facebook" is taking a stand at the expense of significant personal gain.