Some EAs did choose to invest in the hedge fund (though my guess would’ve been it’s a minority of the fund’s money, and wasn’t necessary to get it off the ground). It still looks like the fund has made its investors lots of money (even post-crash it’s up like 80% this year? and great returns before 2026), so doesn’t seem like we need to invoke any special kind of irrationality to explain that decision
To be clear, public accounting suggests the hedge fund lost ~all money that wasn’t invested in Anthropic. The only reason the fund is up is because they got in early on Anthropic with a substantial chunk of their assets (25% of their assets, at 620% returns, with the rest going to zero is what seems to best produce the net-80% number).
I think the fund is indeed largely a failure, as of course basically anyone investing in the hedge fund would have loved to also invest in Anthropic. In that sense, the fund maybe provided some value by being a vehicle for investing early, but that could have also been achieved many other ways, and clearly isn’t why people were investing. If you remove that share, the fund went approximately completely bust.
(I originally had the same impression as you had, which is bad! I think the shareholder letter and public statements by Leopold have been pretty misleading here, in the sense that basically everyone I have talked who learned the actual details of what happened updated substantially negatively after first reading the shareholder letter)
To be clear, public accounting suggests the hedge fund lost ~all money that wasn’t invested in Anthropic. The only reason the fund is up is because they got in early on Anthropic with a substantial chunk of their assets (25% of their assets, at 620% returns, with the rest going to zero is what seems to best produce the net-80% number).
My guess is this is basically wrong, based on public info. I wrote something long but deleted it because you can quibble with details, but for one thing, note WSJ suggests that SALP’s Anthropic stake was only $5B of $45B total pre-crash. And if you guess how SALP would mark Anthropic performance YTD without trying to backchain from the “everything else went to zero” idea, I think you’d get like 4x, not 7.2x. (I’m not confident in my inferences, and I’m not confident that reporting like WSJ’s is correct. But I don’t see the case for your guess.)
Also if the non-Anthropic positions 0.15xed during the drawdown and sale to Citadel, but they’d 3xed in 2026H1 (both figures are pretty arbitrary), it’s misleading to say that SALP “lost ~all money that wasn’t invested in Anthropic” (unless you’re talking about a hypothetical investor who invested right before the crash).
Did you see the linked Twitter thread? That was the logic that convinced me. I agree the WSJ article is some evidence against that. I would be interested in someone digging into this.
This is not properly “digging into this” obviously, but FWIW Fable Max guesses the YTD dollar-weighted return at −15% (with a “plausible range” of −40% to breakeven). And this is including Anthropic. (Link)
(I think dollar-weighted is the better metric here, since I believe the majority of invested money entered during 2026?)
To be clear, public accounting suggests the hedge fund lost ~all money that wasn’t invested in Anthropic. The only reason the fund is up is because they got in early on Anthropic with a substantial chunk of their assets (25% of their assets, at 620% returns, with the rest going to zero is what seems to best produce the net-80% number).
I think the fund is indeed largely a failure, as of course basically anyone investing in the hedge fund would have loved to also invest in Anthropic. In that sense, the fund maybe provided some value by being a vehicle for investing early, but that could have also been achieved many other ways, and clearly isn’t why people were investing. If you remove that share, the fund went approximately completely bust.
See: https://x.com/ohabryka/status/2083698812682731749
(I originally had the same impression as you had, which is bad! I think the shareholder letter and public statements by Leopold have been pretty misleading here, in the sense that basically everyone I have talked who learned the actual details of what happened updated substantially negatively after first reading the shareholder letter)
My guess is this is basically wrong, based on public info. I wrote something long but deleted it because you can quibble with details, but for one thing, note WSJ suggests that SALP’s Anthropic stake was only $5B of $45B total pre-crash. And if you guess how SALP would mark Anthropic performance YTD without trying to backchain from the “everything else went to zero” idea, I think you’d get like 4x, not 7.2x. (I’m not confident in my inferences, and I’m not confident that reporting like WSJ’s is correct. But I don’t see the case for your guess.)
Also if the non-Anthropic positions 0.15xed during the drawdown and sale to Citadel, but they’d 3xed in 2026H1 (both figures are pretty arbitrary), it’s misleading to say that SALP “lost ~all money that wasn’t invested in Anthropic” (unless you’re talking about a hypothetical investor who invested right before the crash).
Did you see the linked Twitter thread? That was the logic that convinced me. I agree the WSJ article is some evidence against that. I would be interested in someone digging into this.
This is not properly “digging into this” obviously, but FWIW Fable Max guesses the YTD dollar-weighted return at −15% (with a “plausible range” of −40% to breakeven). And this is including Anthropic. (Link)
(I think dollar-weighted is the better metric here, since I believe the majority of invested money entered during 2026?)