Why Did the Future Fund Collapse?

The Future Fund collapsed from one day to the next in November of 22, after it came out that the backer was a giant fraud. Leopold Aschenbrenner says the collapse was devastating for people with money on FTX and, closer to home, for the grantees.

Dwarkesh Patel notes that Leopold, at 18, was on a team of four people in charge of deploying billions of dollars. Leopold calls that stretch the heyday. He had worked 70 hour weeks every week for basically a year, on a tiny team that felt like a startup, to build the fund up. Then it was all gone, and the work was tied to the fraud. The team had wanted to help grantees it thought were doing amazing projects. Instead it left them with a giant problem.

Leopold says he did not know about the fraud and would never have worked there if he had. The fund was a separate thing from the business. He did know the backer was extremely risk-taking and narcissistic and did not tolerate disagreement. Biosecurity grants the backer liked because they were cool and flashy did not really seem cost effective once Leopold ran the numbers, and pointing that out made the backer unhappy. By the end the two did not get along. Leopold says people give successful CEOs a pass on their behavior, and paying attention to character, including the character of people you work for, can save a lot of pain.