According to The New York Times, Leopold Aschenbrenner — who had never worked at an investment firm before founding the fund in 2024 — ran an eight-person operation in which just half the staff was dedicated to managing investments. Despite that profile, Goldman Sachs $GS, Bank of America $BAC, and other major Wall Street banks lent the firm tens of billions of dollars, allowing it to build a concentrated position in AI-related stocks. The firm’s executives pressed multiple lenders to raise their leverage ratio all the way to ten times the fund’s investor capital, up from four times, The New York Times reported, citing a banker familiar with the negotiations.