Elizabeth Lopatto

The hedge fund Situational Awareness, founded by former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, who had no previous hedge fund experience, “rapidly sold a large portion of its public equity holdings” as losses mounted. The fund employed only eight people, of whom four were investment professionals. Aschenbrenner named the fund after some essays he wrote. [Link: Situational Awareness offloads large portion of public equity holdings

A fascinating book review. “Muskism, in reading its subject as more a symptom than a person, doesn’t offer any kind of psychological interpretation of Musk’s worldview, but many of his pronouncements and preoccupations reveal an ontological confusion of the categories of human and machine.” [Link: Space Oddity

This 24-year-old first time hedge funder screwed up his AI fund with one weird trick

11 pts Neither artificial nor intelligent. I am not by any means an expert at finance but I think I do now have some advice for people who are: Do not name your hedge fund anything that will be hilarious if it blows up. Don't use a name like "Long-Term Capital Management," or "Amaranth Advisors" (named for the floral…

One day we will have a talk with the people who don’t understand what science fiction is (writing about politics with plausible deniability). Until then, please enjoy Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” originally published in Collier’s in 1950 and taking place on April 28th, 1985. In The Martian Chronicles, the date is revised to August 4, 2026 and guess what! That’s today. [Link: There Will Come Soft Rains

But it's still losing money overall.

Elon Musk's exploding rockets are a front for the real moneymakers.

Privatize the profit, socialize the losses? | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Once, I had some questions about why SpaceX , Elon Musk's healthiest company, acquired xAI, his sickliest one. Now I have some questions about why we're calling the whole thing SpaceX. Look, what we have here, by…

Mostly because I find it hilarious to watch people say out-of-pocket shit to under their own government names to people they are going to see at the farmer’s market and everywhere else. (The problem of people being mean online is not, it turns out, anonymity.) Here’s one woman’s story of the local consequences of a post. [Link: How I became the villain of El Cerrito’s Nextdoor

A lot of staffers subscribe just because we enjoy his work (and when he gets his vacation ruined). But today’s newsletter is about the SpaceX lockup expiring — how it should work vs what we will find out tomorrow about how it will work — and how the noted AI hedge fund Situational Awareness may have tanked the bets of noted AI hedge fund Situational Awareness. [Link: SpaceX Unlocks Tomorrow