This Guy Is The NEXT Warren Buffett (And He Just Shorted AI)

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]All right, so this generation's Warren Buffett just put a $ 1.5 billion short on Nvidia. Then he put $6.5 billion worth of shorts on other AI stocks for a total of $8 billion. Actually, let me rewind a little bit because a lot of people don't even know who this guy is.

[00:00:15]So, there's two Warren Buffetts in the world right now. One is a 95-year-old guy sitting on $380 billion in cash and he hasn't bought anything in years. The other one is a 24-y old kid who used to work at OpenAI before they fired him for We'll get to why they fired him. It's It's interesting. Now, he runs a hedge fund and he's shorting AI like crazy.

[00:00:35]So, Wall Street spent the last 60 years looking for the next Warren Buffett and and they might have just found him, but not in the way that anyone anyone expected. In case you don't know me, my name's Nick. I've been a professional investor. I'm professional trader for 24 years. If you hear any weird noises today, I got people working on my roof, so we're just going to have to suffer through it together. Today, we're going to look at why a 24-year-old kid who got fired by OpenAI 2 years ago is now rumored to be the next uh this generation's next Warren Buffett, whatever. You know what I mean? We're also going to try and pronounce his name without making every German viewer cry, which which which is going to be a challenge. Uh but but it should be fun.

[00:01:13]And we're going to look at the trade that made him, which is a very important trade. We're going to look at the massive shorts he just took uh on AI, why he took them. Shorts that align perfectly with my thesis, by the way.

[00:01:23]So, I like this kid already. Look, if he's right, the AI bubble is about to pop and that's going to cause havoc on the markets. But before I start, this is not financial advice. This is not an inducement to buy or sell any assets.

[00:01:35]And as always, do not take financial advice from some random dude on YouTube.

[00:01:37]Now, let's figure this out together. So, who is this kid? His name is Leopold Ash ashen Brena. German viewers, let me know if I got that right. Uh, both his parents were doctors. Uh, he he grew up in Berlin. He went to a German school, a German school, of course, a German school. Uh, but then he gets into Colombia and he graduates valadictorian at age 19, dual degrees in economics and maths. 2 years later, he's at OpenAI, 21 years old, sat on this super alignment team with all the big shots. Uh, and he ends up co-authoring a paper on AI safety that lands the biggest machine learning conference in the world. Pretty big deal. But then in April of 2024, OpenAI fires him. They say it's over an information leak. Information leak.

[00:02:23]Ashen Brener says, "No, no, that's not what it's about. It was about a security memo that he wrote that the company didn't want air in publicly, but either way, he's out." And you know what? We can get into the conspiracy, but but let's keep this about finance, although it's a fun conspiracy. Now, look, most 22-year-olds fired by the most important company on Earth go on a on a bender in Thailand. But this kid is different.

[00:02:45]He's he's he's built different. He spends his time writing a white paper, writing an essay. In June, two months after finding after being fired, he publishes a 165page essay. Massive. He calls it situational awareness the decade ahead. And it opens with one line. You can see the future first in San Francisco. Look, as far as I've heard, all you see in San Francisco is homeless people on the street.

[00:03:11]So if that's the future, count me out.

[00:03:12]But do they still do that by the way?

[00:03:14]Anyway, he spends 165 pages arguing that artificial general intelligence, AGI, is arriving by 2027 and the world is nowhere near ready for it. The essay goes viral. Within 48 hours, every billionaire in Silicon Valley has it on their iPhone. By the autumn, he's launched a hedge fund. He starts with about 225 million, mostly from people who read the essay and wanted it in. So you got the Collison brothers uh from Stripe, you got Nat Freiedman. Uh the reported list reads like a a hoohoo of evil billionaire. Sorry, not evil billionaires, allegedly evil billionaires. Sorry, don't sue me. So 12 months later, that 225 million is sat at 5.4 5.5 billion actually in public holdings. By the first quarter of this year, the fund's notional exposure is 13.7 billion.

[00:04:05]That kind of growth isn't normal. This isn't even like young talented investor growth. That's every single thing I've touched turns to gold. Every single moonshot has worked out sort of growth.

[00:04:16]It's insane. So, what was he actually doing? Let me set the scene. Q4 2025.

[00:04:24]Nvidia is the most valuable company on Earth. The S&P 500 is hitting all-time highs week after week. CNBC is wallto-wall AI coverage. Every retail trader in America is yoloing call options on Palunteer. Ashen Brener is reading his own essay. The essay the essay said AI needs compute. Compute needs energy. The US grid is broken. New data centers are waiting 5 years just to get plugged in. That's 5 years of chips sat in boxes because the copper wires aren't there. That's why I'm wrong on copper by the way. Not financial advice allegedly. Anyway, Ashen Ashen Ashen Ashen Brener, whatever. He he wasn't buying copper. He was buying Bloom.

[00:05:05]What's Bloom? Bloom's a company. It's a company called Bloom Energy. The ticker is BE. I think they make fuel cells, boxes that you bolt on to a data center that generate electricity on site, completely bypassing the grid. It's interesting. So, Bloom has been around since uh 2001. They they barely ever made any profit. Most of the analyst world has them as a value trap. Uh Ashen Brena loads up though, buys roughly 10 million shares at an average price of uh around about $105 per share, plus call options on top of that. Position size was around about 875 million out of a fund that 12 months earlier only had $225 million in the whole thing. By the 1st of May, Bloom is trading at 290.

[00:05:48]They've signed a fuel cell deal with Oracle. They've got a $5 billion partnership with Brookfield. By the way, Oracle, remember that because it's important because he just shorted Oracle. Anyway, so they've got a 20 billion order backlog. This is Bloom.

[00:05:59]That single $875 million position is now worth $2.2 billion in about 6 months. He didn't buy Bloom because it was it was cheap. He he didn't run a discounted cash flow and find the margins of safety, you know, like Warren Buffett does. He bought it because of a story about where the world is heading, a thesis, a thesis that he has, a thesis that a lot of people share. And these days, thesises and story matter more than logic and numbers when it comes to investing. Well, well, until the bubble pops and then everyone's going to get an unhealthy dose of logic and numbers. But the the point is that this isn't a Buffett trade. A buffet trade is buying a boring profitable business below its intrinsic worth and waiting 20 years.

[00:06:41]Ash and Brena bought a loss-making fuel cell company priced for a future that didn't even exist yet and just waited 6 months, not even that long. Actually, Let's slow down and walk through what's actually broken about the stock market right now in my opinion because it's important to understand this. So Buffett's own indicator, the one that that he he named after himself, uh it's called the single biggest measure of where valuations stand. It's sat at 230% right now. It's it's called the Buffett indicator. It measures the value of the stock market versus GDP. So the stock market right now is 2.3x the US GDP which is historically speaking absurdly overvalued. The thing is it's been overvalued since 2021 though. So if you blindly followed this indicator and sold you would have been sidelined watching stocks AI etc. print all-time highs. So this isn't a slight on Buffett by the way. Buffett still holds stocks. He he doesn't blindly follow the indicator.

[00:07:36]It's just an indicator. But the point is in 2008 and I'm doing these numbers from memory so they might be a bit off but in 2008 the indicator was around about 110% and the market crashed. In 2001 I think it was about 150% and the market crashed. Today it's at 230% which tells us that the market is obscenely overvalued. The old rules rules don't work anymore. I mean until they do but we'll get to that later. Anyway, so what are the new rules? Well, things pump not because it makes sense or that they generate revenue or for any logical reason. They pump because the story sounds good, the marketing is good, and the Mag 7, they dump half a trillion dollars into that thing in one year. And I mean, that's what they've done this year, by the way, between Google, Amazon, and Friends. We're talking about $600 billion pumped into AI infrastructure. Now, what's the revenue side of that? You spend money, you expect to make money, right? Well, Goldman Sachs ran the maths. They estimated that you need about 1 trillion in annual profit on AI by year's end to justify that spending. What's the actual consensus revenue forecast for for the year for AI? It's around 450 billion.

[00:08:43]And revenue, by the way, is the one that comes before you take out expenses. So, when you deduct expenses, let me do the math. Um, yeah, they'll probably lose money. So, that isn't a business model.

[00:08:53]It's it's just a bet on a story. Some AI CEO like Daario or or Sam Alman, they say, "By the way, AI is going to replace like every job ever. It's going to replace your job, his job, her job." Why do they say that? Because it makes everyone say, "Oh my god, I need to invest in that. It's going to replace everyone's job. I need to invest my money there, right?" Well, when re in reality, AI cannot even tell you how many Rs in the word strawberry. But that's true, by the way. But it gets weirder than that. Anyway, so uh Microsoft has $8 billion of Azour orders right now that that it physically just cannot fulfill. Not because they don't have the chips. The chips are sat in inventory. The problem is the power.

[00:09:31]They can't plug those chips into anything. $80 billion of revenue stuck in a warehouse because the wires aren't there. Copper wires, by the way. That's why I'm long on copper, in case in case you didn't know. Wires are made of copper. Anyway, not financial advice.

[00:09:45]Now, uh let's go back to Ashen Brennan's portfolio. He's not buying chips. He's buying the things that you have to plug into the chips or plug the chips into.

[00:09:54]So, so he bought Bloom. A and that Bloom trade is the trade that made him. It's what made him really, really famous. But what did he do next? Well, on May 15th, his fund filed its quarterly 13F with the SEC. Public document. Anyone can read it. It's just a normal document that that funds have to file. In that filing, he disclosed $ 1.56 billion in put options on Nvidia. A put option is a short trade. He's shorting Nvidia. What a legend. He also has got over $2 billion of bearish positions against the chip ETF SM. Too many abbreviations. Uh the the VanX semiconductor ETF. The ticker is SMH.

[00:10:30]Uh semiconductors by the way are the physical chips that AI runs on. He's also got put options on like Broadcom, Oracle, AMD, uh ASML, a lot a lot of them. A lot of them. I think the total notional value of all his shorts is actually $8 billion. Um, so he shorted basically the entire AI chip stack. Okay. And this makes me feel validated, by the way, in my thesis because this is kind of what I've been doing, although I don't really short uh like I used to in the old days.

[00:10:58]Uh, but I exited Nvidia and I've been buying stuff that needs to be built to for for the data centers to power these AI chips. Anyway, enough about me. Let's talk about Warren Buffett Jr. or Ashen Brener. Now look, you might assume he's bearish on AI now, but he he kind of isn't really bearish on AI. His public position is still that AGI arrives by 2027. And I hope he's wrong, by the way.

[00:11:21]I mean, from from going to not being able to tell how many Rs in the word strawberry to full AGI, I think that's a stretch. I think he's probably wrong.

[00:11:29]But anyway, he still thinks that AI the AI story is the biggest investment thesis of our generation. He hasn't changed his mind on any of that. What he has done though is is more interesting.

[00:11:39]He's saying that the money flow is about to rotate. The chips have been the trade for for the last 3 years. The capex is now so absurd. Uh the multiples are so stretched out. The revenue gap is so wide that the next leg of the story isn't going to be the people selling the chips. It's going to be the people powering them, housing them, cooling them, supplying them, all that stuff.

[00:12:01]And on the long side of the same fund, he's still loading up on the power and infrastructure fees he started with. I always come back to Charlie Mer on this one. By the way, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. I I quote that a lot. What's Wall Street's incentive right now? Keep retail buying chips, buying Nvidia. Keep them in the trade that's worked for three years and still gets clicks on CNBC. Right. What's Ashen Brener's incentive? He gets paid on what his fund returns, not on what he says on television. He has no platform to protect. So when his model says to rotate, he just rotates. Anyway, so so back to where we started, there's two Buffetts. One is 95, sat on the biggest cash bar in corporate history, refusing to play the game. The other is 24, just put on the biggest contrarian short on Wall Street. Now look, we don't actually know if Ashbrun is the next Buffett. I mean, this guy is young and maybe he just got lucky for a few runs. Buffett's kept his uh his luck up for 60 years.

[00:12:58]So, it's not luck, it's skill. Uh but only time will tell because the reality is everyone can look like a genius when everything is going up. Although to be fair, Bloom was a crazy good call. I mean, that that was awesome. The thing is Ashen Brena could blow up next year.

[00:13:14]He could he could lose all the money.

[00:13:15]The trip short could go horribly wrong.

[00:13:17]The power trade could unwind. AGI could turn out to be much further away than anyone thinks. All of this is possible.

[00:13:24]He's 24 years old. He's not lived through a real bare market as an investor. But but but here's what I keep coming back to. The people insisting the market is going to return to fundamentals have been wrong for for 15 years running. Every value style sell signal has fired and failed while the S&P has kept printing new all-time highs. Maybe the market did rewire.

[00:13:43]Maybe value investing as a discipline genuinely ended sometime around 2010 and nobody bothered to announce it. Maybe Ashen Brener is the new breed who unlike a lot of us just said screw it. Value investing is dead. I'm just buying stories. I'm buying a thesis. I'm reminded by this quote by Mousashi, by the way. Uh it's to transcend retation, you must first embrace retation. I'm pretty sure he didn't actually say that, but it's a fun quote. Uh may my editor might edit that might uh bleep that out.

[00:14:14]I'm not sure. Maybe Ashen Brener has embraced how the stock market is and now he has transcended. If he's right, the AI bubble doesn't pop. It just moves on. The money rotates out of the chips and into things AI cannot function without. I mean, it will feel like a pop anyway. Let's face it, if Nvidia crashes, we're going to be in for a brutal 2027. But yeah, if he's right, we're going to see a massive rotation.

[00:14:38]So, there'll still be opportunity even if the bubble is popping, which is, you know, fairly common in every bubble pop anyway. If he's wrong, he gets blown out on his second year and then he just becomes a footnote in finance history.

[00:14:50]Honestly, I hope the kid makes it. He got fired by the AI establishment, so he's already a legend in my book. I'll see you in the next one.