Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 24-year-old AI investor behind the hedge fund Situational Awareness, reportedly told people in Silicon Valley that he planned to save enough money to buy entire galaxies once artificial intelligence made humanity vastly richer.
The extraordinary ambition, reported by The Wall Street Journal on 26 August, has resurfaced just weeks after his AI-focused fund suffered a devastating collapse.
According to the report, Aschenbrenner had discussed the idea at San Francisco dinner parties for years, apparently treating the purchase of galaxies as a future financial problem rather than a question of whether such cosmic real estate could actually be bought. He reportedly believed rapid advances in AI would unlock enormous resources, enable humanity to colonise distant planets and eventually make control of parts of the universe possible.
The galaxy plan was not simply a throwaway joke, according to people familiar with Aschenbrenner's conversations. The Wall Street Journal reported that he said he intended to save money so that he could eventually buy galaxies and had even promised to buy one for his wife, Anthropic chief of staff Avital Balwit.
BREAKING: Leopold Aschenbrenner reportedly promised his now-wife (and Chief of Staff at Anthropic) that he’d buy her a galaxy before his $45 billion hedge fund blew up. pic.twitter.com/sWBNtkXJv5
There is, of course, a rather large practical problem with the idea. Galaxies are not conventional assets sitting on a property market, and the universe does not provide a mechanism for an investor to purchase the Milky Way in the way someone might acquire a company or a tract of land.
The Andromeda Galaxy, often cited as the Milky Way's nearest major galactic neighbour, is roughly 2.5 million light years away. Even if AI eventually transformed the economics of space travel, the speed of light remains a fundamental limit under current physics. A fortune capable of buying a galaxy would not, by itself, make intergalactic travel instantaneous.
Aschenbrenner's huge ambitions were based on the belief that AI would create enormous wealth, yet his own attempt to build an investment empire has now run into the much less glamorous realities of borrowed money, falling share prices and mounting losses.
Situational Awareness reached roughly $45 billion (£33.1 billion) in assets at its peak, according to recent reporting. But the fund was hit by a sharp sell-off in AI-related stocks in July, losing about two-thirds of its value and forcing it to sell most of its public market investments.
The fund had put a lot of money into AI infrastructure and technology companies. It also borrowed money to make bigger investments, which meant it could make more when prices rose but lose much more when they fell. When the market turned against those investments, the losses became serious enough for Situational Awareness to sell much of its portfolio to Citadel.
Citadel then moved quickly to reduce the risk it had taken on. Reuters reported on 21 August that the firm had sold more than 80% of the investments it acquired from Situational Awareness, completing nearly 100 large trades worth more than $4 billion (£2.94 billion).
The collapse has also drawn attention from regulators. Reuters reported on 24 August that the US Securities and Exchange Commission had sent subpoenas to Wall Street banks that worked with Situational Awareness, seeking information about the fund's trades and its use of borrowed money.
Yet Aschenbrenner has not simply disappeared from the investment world. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Situational Awareness had made a $400 million (£294.4 million) investment in a private company, suggesting that the fund was attempting to resume investing after the near-collapse.
In his 2024 essay, Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, Aschenbrenner argued that AI could develop much faster than many people expected and eventually reshape economies and global politics.
The question now is not whether artificial intelligence could change the world. It is whether the fortunes built around that belief can survive the much more ordinary realities of investing.
