Good Morning! A former Goldman Sachs wealth management employee says she quit after compliance officials took issue with her "Investment Baker" side hustle page. The CEO of Cava says the term "slop bowl" is offensive to customers. And Italian app investor Bending Spoons filed for a US IPO targeting a $20 billion valuation, with a portfolio spanning AOL, Eventbrite, Vimeo, Brightcove, and about 50 other businesses.

Sam Bankman-Fried formally applied for a presidential pardon, still serving his 25-year sentence for fraud and conspiracy following FTX's 2022 collapse. And PointState Capital hedge fund billionaire Zach Schrieber listed his 3.5-acre Hamptons mansion for a record $152.5 million.

Plus: AI fears spurred a 70% plunge in private equity tech deal value, and OpenAI filed for its IPO as the AI investment race intensifies.

Build custom deployments around your firm’s unique workflows with Endex.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Gen-Z’s Hedge Fund Boss

Leopold Aschenbrenner launched his hedge fund Situational Awareness in 2024 with a few hundred million dollars and no professional investing experience. And the 24-year-old’s fund is now worth more than $20 billion, up 270% after fees this year through May and up more than 1,000% since inception. That size puts him in the same neighborhood as Bill Ackman's Pershing Square and Dan Loeb's Third Point.

Aschenbrenner entered Columbia at 15, graduated valedictorian in 2021, joined OpenAI's Superalignment team, and in 2024 published a 165-page essay called "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead”, arguing that AI was advancing fast enough to reshape the global economy and geopolitical competition. His AI manifesto went viral after Michael Dell, Ivanka Trump, and thousands of others shared it.

And Aschenbrenner then did what any 23-year-old with a viral AI manifesto and strong OpenAI connections would do: started a hedge fund. Early backers included Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, and Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, both currently helping lead Meta's AI efforts. 

The biggest position is Anthropic, which now accounts for roughly one-fifth of Situational Awareness's assets. The fund first invested in Anthropic in February 2025 at a $61.5 billion valuation, and Anthropic is now valued at $965 billion. The fund also got into SK Hynix in November 2024, riding the Korean memory chip maker's run into the trillion-dollar club, and co-led a funding round for MatX, an AI chip startup, alongside Jane Street. 

Jane Street, the notoriously selective quant trading giant that almost never allocates to outside managers, is both an investor in the fund and a co-investor in its venture deals, including a new round for Fluidstack, an AI cloud computing provider. When Jane Street starts co-investing alongside you in venture rounds, you have crossed from "interesting fund" to "firm people take very seriously."

The cultural phenomenon around Aschenbrenner's regulatory filings may be the wildest part of the story. Like all managers above $100 million, Situational Awareness files quarterly 13F disclosures of its U.S. long positions, routine paperwork that most funds file in complete obscurity. But Aschenbrenner's filings are treated as blockbuster events. 

Autopilot, the app behind the viral Nancy Pelosi stock tracker, launched an option in March letting users copy its disclosed trades automatically. When news broke that Situational Awareness had taken a stake in solar manufacturer T1 Energy, shares jumped 23% in a single day on the second-highest trading volume in the company's history. A podcast misread some options activity in May and published an episode titled "The Best AI Investor Just Shorted the Entire Market”, it racked up over 100,000 YouTube views, but he hadn't shorted anything.

Takeaway: Every market mania produces its celebrity stock picker, Ryan Jacob's Internet Fund in the dot-com era, Cathie Wood's ARK during the pandemic rally. Aschenbrenner is this cycle's version, and has the AI research credentials to back up the thesis rather than just ride the momentum. The fund got hit by DeepSeek, recovered fast, ended 2025 up 200%, and is up another 270% through May of this year. The AI kid is having his moment, let’s see how long it lasts.

PRESENTED BY ENDEX

JPMorgan: "Some Employees are Spending More on Tokens Than Their Salary"

After Uber reportedly spent its entire 2026 AI budget in 4 months, the conversation among AI leaders is concentrating on cost optimization and value. New model releases are showing similar benchmark performance, with materially different cost to their predecessors.

Firms on Wall Street are partnering with Endex to route agent requests to models that meet the required quality threshold and are reserving frontier models for the select tasks where incremental intelligence produces measurable economic value.

Endex brings these agents directly into Excel, building custom deployments around each firm's unique workflows.

HEADLINES

Top Reads

• Gen Zer quits Goldman Sachs after clash over 'Investment Baker' social media side hustle (NY Post)

• Cava CEO: the 'slop bowl' term is offensive (Yahoo Finance)

• Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Eventbrite, files for IPO (Axios)

• Sam Bankman-Fried says he 'absolutely' wants presidential pardon from inside his federal prison cell (Fox Business)

• A $152.5 million Hamptons property stands to crush an area record (NY Post)

• Clean tech venture investors face concentration risks in funds (BB)

• Blue Owl, Ares court Mexico's $500 billion pension fund windfall (BB)

• Apple debuts improved Siri and AI features as it races to catch rivals (Yahoo Finance)

• Nvidia CEO shrugs off tech stock rout with AI just 'beginning' (BB)

• Blackstone looks to sell $2 billion of fund stakes (BB)

• AI fears spur 70% plunge in private equity tech deal value (BB)

• The new college football millionaires spending $80,000 on their high school proms (WSJ)

• Lavazza launches single-serve tablets to make espresso (CNBC)

• The 24-year-old AI wiz who counts Jane Street as an investor (WSJ)

• Google's unique approach to getting data centers built (WSJ)

• Why private equity in football can still be a winning proposition (FT)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• Markets mixed: The Nasdaq rebounded more than 0.8%, while the S&P 500 gained 0.3% and the Dow finished slightly lower.

• Semiconductors rebound: Chip stocks led the recovery after Friday's sharp sell-off.

• Oil volatile: WTI crude briefly reached $95 before settling near $91 per barrel.

• Yields higher: Treasury yields continued to edge up following last week's strong jobs report.

• Geopolitics: Iran announced a halt to strikes against Israel, though ceasefire uncertainty remains elevated.

Economic Data Highlights

• CPI ahead: Markets are focused on Wednesday's May CPI report.

• Headline inflation: Consensus expects 4.2% year-over-year, up from 3.8% in April.

• Core inflation: Forecasts call for 2.9%, slightly above April's 2.8% reading.

• Fed outlook: Higher inflation and a resilient labor market continue to support a higher-for-longer interest-rate environment.

Sector Trends

• Tech cooling: Investors have become more selective after the strong AI-driven rally earlier this spring.

• Broader leadership: Strength has expanded beyond mega-cap technology into other sectors of the market.

• Market rotation: Recent gains in the Dow and equal-weight indexes suggest healthier market participation.

• Outlook: Resilient consumers, steady employment, and solid earnings trends continue to support the broader market backdrop.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Intel ($INTC) +11% after Google placed an order to manufacture more than 3 million TPUs via Intel Foundry by 2028.

• (+) Marvell ($MRVL) +10% because S&P Dow Jones Indices announced the company will join the S&P 500.

• (–) Wix.com ($WIX) -8% after management’s delayed flagship product launch and slowing growth trajectory left investors skeptical.

Prediction Markets

• Game 4 is tomorrow. Will the Knicks take it?

• Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

• Bouygues Telecom, Orange, and Free-iliad Group agreed to buy SFR, France’s second-largest telco, for around $23.5 billion

• Ingredion agreed to acquire Tate & Lyle, a U.K. ingredients maker, for around $5 billion

• Carlyle agreed to pay $700 million to acquire Chung Ho Group, a South Korean renter of home and healthcare appliances

• Arcline Investment Management agreed to acquire Continental Aerospace Technologies, a maker of piston aircraft engines, for $535 million

• PhysicsX, a physics AI startup for industrials, raised $300 million

• A, a cybersecurity startup focused on AI-powered attacks, raised $47 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

What I Wish I Knew About Luck

Description:
A practical and optimistic guide from Tina Seelig on creating more opportunities for success by understanding how luck actually works. Rather than treating luck as something random, the book explores how curiosity, action, relationships, and persistence increase the likelihood of positive outcomes. Drawing on research and real-world examples, it provides a framework for turning aspirations into achievements by putting yourself in positions where "luck" is more likely to find you.

Book Length: 240 pages
Release Date: April 14, 2026

Ideal For:
Students, entrepreneurs, and professionals looking to create more opportunities, accelerate personal growth, and better understand the role of luck in success

Luck is often what happens when preparation curiosity and action intersect at the right moment.

DAILY VISUAL

AI-Driven Explosion in the Number of Entrepreneurs

PRESENTED BY MOSAIC

Mosaic Introduces Major Upgrades to FactSet Integration and Take-Private Analysis

Mosaic continues to enhance its FactSet integration and take-private analysis capabilities, enabling users to automatically pull live share prices, broker targets, market data, and VWAP metrics directly into AVP outputs.

Teams can now incorporate premium-to-L3M and premium-to-L6M VWAP analyses with greater accuracy, while flexible line-item controls allow each VWAP metric to be toggled on or off to customize outputs.

These updates streamline valuation workflows, improve data accessibility, and provide deal teams with deeper insights and greater efficiency across the Mosaic platform.

Demo the platform today.

DAILY ACUMEN

Everybody’s Dancing

In July 1518, in the city of Strasbourg, a woman known as Frau Troffea stepped into the street and began to dance. No music, no celebration. She simply danced, alone, for nearly a week. Then something strange happened. Others joined her. Within a month, roughly 400 people were dancing uncontrollably in the streets, and some were dancing themselves to death from strokes, heart attacks, and exhaustion.

The authorities reached a conclusion that now seems insane. They decided the cure was more dancing, and hired musicians and professional dancers to keep the afflicted moving. It made everything worse. Historians still debate the cause, but the leading theory is mass hysteria, transmitted person to person not through any virus but through the mind. People saw others dancing, something broke loose, and they danced too.

This is the same machinery that drives every bubble. People do not pile into an asset because they independently concluded it was cheap. They pile in because everyone around them is, and the sight of others getting rich breaks something loose. The authorities, then as now, tend to cheer on the very thing that is killing everyone.

You are more suggestible than you think. The crowd is not a source of information. It is a source of contagion, and the moment you feel certain because everyone else feels certain is exactly the moment to check whether you are still thinking or just dancing.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• Why being good at your job isn’t good enough to get promoted anymore

• How to have a difficult conversation

• The surprising habits linked to dementia

• 5 signs your cognitive load is too high

• How to stay ambitious when there’s no ladder to climb

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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