Leopold Aschenbrenner is set to marry Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in a lavish ceremony this weekend in Carmel, California. Fortune first reported their engagement in October. According to the Wall Street Journal, the festivities include a colloquium with panels and breakout sessions, a ceremony at a Tuscan-style villa, and a send-off to a forest spa retreat for the honeymoon.

However, the groom arrives at the altar after a harrowing week fighting to save his hedge fund from collapse.

Aschenbrenner, in his twenties, earned the nickname the "Nostradamus of AI" after growing his hedge fund, Situational Awareness, to $45 billion in capital through concentrated bets on high-flying memory chip and data center stocks such as CoreWeave and SK Hynix. The fund shares its name with a widely circulated essay series Aschenbrenner published arguing that artificial general intelligence could arrive by the end of the decade, views that placed him at the center of debates over AI acceleration and national security policy. The Journal reported that he was leveraged three to four times, borrowing three to four dollars for every dollar of capital.

For two years, the strategy delivered. But during the week of his wedding, a black swan event struck. As traders grew anxious about AI infrastructure spending without clear returns, memory stocks and major tech names like SK Hynix and SanDisk plunged 30%. The semiconductor sector posted its worst month since 2002. Rival traders identified Aschenbrenner's holdings and shorted them, betting he would be forced to sell, the Journal reported. The pressure compounded: banks demanded additional collateral, prompting him to sell stock to meet margin calls, which further depressed prices. The unwinding echoed the dynamics of other concentrated, highly leveraged funds that collapsed when counterparties detected their positions and moved against them, most notably the 2021 implosion of Archegos Capital Management.

In a Thursday letter to investors, first reported by Reuters, Aschenbrenner drew a comparison to a bank run—"vulnerability begetting more vulnerability."

By Wednesday, he was scrambling to liquidate whatever he could. Bloomberg reported that he approached Sequoia and Greenoaks about purchasing private stakes, including a $3.5 billion portion of his Anthropic stake. That deal fell through. His backers, Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison, spent hours at his offices as he negotiated with Citadel and Millennium well past midnight, according to the Journal.

Ultimately, Citadel prevailed. Before Thursday's market open, Ken Griffin acquired the bulk of Aschenbrenner's public portfolio at more than 10% below market value, the Journal reported. Aschenbrenner used the proceeds to repay his lenders. The fund survived with approximately $10 billion, retaining the Anthropic stake intact.

On Thursday, as guests began arriving in Carmel, Aschenbrenner penned another letter to investors. He confirmed that his shorts and leverage had been eliminated. The fund was down 67% for the month but remained up 80% year to date. He stated that the fund had not been liquidated and would not shut down, while offering one-on-one phone calls with investors in the coming week—the same week he is expected to be on his honeymoon.

"I take full responsibility for these events," he wrote.

Aschenbrenner's wedding guests likely include many of his investors and colleagues. He met Balwit at the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic vehicle funded by Sam Bankman-Fried that collapsed alongside FTX in late 2022. His fund was seeded by the Collison brothers, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. He previously shared an office with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel and hosted happy hours for OpenAI and Anthropic researchers, as Fortune reported in October.

Neither Situational Awareness nor Anthropic responded to Fortune's request for comment.

Balwit has previously joked about the close-knit nature of their circle. On X, she wrote that she asked her wedding planners for a "European Garden" aesthetic, noting that the wedding falls "on the cusp of the singularity." She added: "Our wedding planners nod sagely, they are taking notes. They think we have lost it."