Ross Douthat, the former New York Times columnist recently hired by CBS News chief Bari Weiss as a “60 Minutes” correspondent, has a side gig his new bosses may not have anticipated – officiating weddings for Silicon Valley’s AI elite.
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The conservative commentator officiated the wedding of 24-year-old hedge fund manager Leopold Aschenbrenner just days after his $45 billion fund collapsed, as reported in a lengthy Wall Street Journal profile of the controversial financier.
According to a new report, Douthat reached out to Aschenbrenner after reading his viral 165-page manifesto, “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” which predicted AI would soon unlock superintelligence and reshape human history.
The two met last year during a Douthat family road trip through California, where Aschenbrenner and his fiancée, Avital Balwit — chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — hosted them for dinner, soliciting marriage advice and startling the Douthat children with predictions about AI’s future.
“He wanted to buy galaxies,” the Journal reported. “Some of his friends weren’t always sure what to make of Aschenbrenner’s intergalactic ambitions. He once left the room and they debated whether he was referring to physical galaxies or a type of private plane.”
“No, he assured them when he came back,” the report added. “He meant galaxies.”
When the couple later asked Douthat to officiate their wedding, he says he was surprised enough to seek counsel from a priest friend before agreeing.
The wedding, held in Carmel earlier this month, drew more than a dozen Anthropic employees, philosopher Will MacAskill, veterans of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Future Fund, and billionaires who had backed Aschenbrenner’s fund, Situational Awareness.
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One guest reportedly toasted Citadel CEO Ken Griffin for making the wedding possible, while another referenced Aschenbrenner’s longstanding promise to one day buy his wife a galaxy, reflecting his belief that AI would unlock cosmic-scale resources for humanity.
The celebration came just two days after Situational Awareness — once hailed as evidence Aschenbrenner was AI’s answer to Nostradamus — imploded amid a brutal tech selloff triggered partly by cheap new Chinese AI models.
The fund, which had borrowed roughly $3 for every $1 of capital, fell 67 percent by month’s end, and investor Jane Street reported its worst monthly loss ever, roughly $15 billion.
Citadel bought much of Aschenbrenner’s stock portfolio at a discount in a trade that helped fuel one of its best months in years.
Securities regulators are now investigating the fund’s trading activity, with no formal allegations made, and the firm says it will “cooperate to the fullest extent with any regulatory request.”
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