Former L Brands CEO Les Wexner’s $1 million seed investment in CoreWeave has grown right into a $720 million stake within the AI cloud giant, which is now valued at over $19 billion.
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Les Wexner, the billionaire Victoria’s Secret owner who left L Brands in 2020 when his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein got here into focus, is making the most of the AI boom.
Thanks to a $1 million seed investment in Atlantic Crypto, a little-known company that later became AI cloud giant CoreWeave, the 86-year-old’s family trust now owns a $720 million stake in one of the vital beneficial AI startups around. The Ohio-based billionaire is considered one of America’s richest people, with an estimated net value of $6.3 billion.
Wexner’s massive stake within the $19 billion startup was disclosed in a lawsuit filed in May 2024 by asset management firm Florence Capital Advisors within the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The New York-based asset manager claims it’s entitled to a $6.9 million fee for advising Wexner’s family trust on investing within the startup in 2019.
CoreWeave offers access to sought-after chips used to construct AI models. It is one of the vital highly valued AI startups to emerge from mainstream artificial intelligence development. In May, the corporate raised $7.5 billion in loans from Blackstone and 1.1 billion US dollars in equity to construct an enormous data center network that may provide the computing power needed to coach AI. But in 2019, it was a struggling cryptocurrency miner that had just begun to Graphics chips to AI startups from a garage in New Jersey.
According to Pitchbook data, CoreWeave raised $1.2 million in a seed round in March 2019. Wexner’s money manager Greg Hersch of Florence Capital invested $1 million then, later purchased one other $600,000 in shares from the corporate’s Series A round and doubled down again with a further convertible note. All of that was put right into a trust arrange for the good thing about Wexner’s 4 children, Sarah, Hannah, David and Harry.
These investments have now grown to a $720 million stake within the AI startup, which is rumored to be a IPO next yr – and a legal battle over an apparently random jackpot.
The dispute is a rat’s nest of intrigue within the New York financial world, involving a father-son duo hired to administer Wexner’s money after Jeffrey Epstein allegedly stole $46 million from his family’s trust funds, a separate $100 million stake in CoreWeave held by a bankrupt hedge fund, and allegations of double payment and the mysterious disappearance of files containing records of the billionaire’s funds.
Florence Capital denies all of this, insisting it’s entitled to a fee for investment advice that generated “an almost unimaginable return of 30,986%” when Wexner sold $71 million value of CoreWeave stock in November 2023. That sale, combined with Wexner’s estimated remaining stake in CoreWeave, yields a complete gain on the investment of slightly below $800 million.
Wexner, Florence Capital and CoreWeave didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Wexner’s CoreWeave investment coincided with a bet on data centers which might be increasingly supporting the AI wave. Since 2019, he has sold over $450 million value of land around his home in New Albany, Ohio, and in neighboring Licking County to tech giants like Google, Meta and Facebook, in addition to Wall Street heavyweights like Blackstone, who’ve used it to construct massive data centers. With greater than $15 billion in planned data center investments announced for Franklin and Licking County up to now yr alone, in accordance with Washington DC-based business subsidy watchdog Good Jobs First, Wexner is well positioned for similar deals in the long run. Through his real estate development firm, the New Albany Company, he still owns about $850 million value of farmland in the world, in accordance with Good Jobs First. Forbes’ estimates.
A Forbes An investigation released in April make clear Wexner’s key behind-the-scenes role in bringing a $20 billion Intel chip manufacturing plant to New Albany. The Columbus, Ohio, suburb won the Intel deal over a contest from dozens of other states since the New Albany Company parceled out 1,000 acres of farmland for what Intel hopes shall be the world’s largest semiconductor plant. The billionaire made an estimated $35 million profit on that deal alone. He is constructing a 400-acre mixed-use development next to the Intel site to accommodate his suppliers and was actively buying up more land as of July 25.
