Morning Coffee: Sad story of the 26-year-old who worked 80 hour weeks & was replaced by AI. Boasting about sleeping in the office is back

If you play with fire, you could get burned. This applies equally if the fire is simply a large language model (LLM) and its spawn of agentic agents. 

Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.

Donald King, a finance graduate from the University of Texas, was having fun playing with LLMs and agentic agents at PWC, until he was unexpectedly fired in October last year. 

This came as a shock, says King, who is 26 years-old and had been sacrificing his social life for 80-hour-weeks in the weeds of AI. He felt like he was part of the future, a 'pioneer in the new age of automation.' He had a flat in Hudson Yards and he would do pull-ups during meetings with his camera turned off. It was the life.

But then, NYMag says that PWC, which announced a $1bn investment in AI in early 2024, decided to cut some costs. King thought he was safe, what with his work ethic and winning a hackathon. He even assembled a presentation on a team of AI agents he'd built in his spare time and presented this winning product to 70,000 people at PWC. Two hours after making the victory presentation, he was fired. In retrospect, this was predictable: King's team at PWC were building AI agents that could pretend to be actual employees. He felt a sense of "disgust."

It's not clear whether Donald King is still living in Hudson Yards and flexing. However, after a period of depression and intense smoking of weed, he now runs a digital marketing business with his girlfriend and claims to make $10k a month in the process. A happy ending.   

Separately, while 26 year-olds in consulting are working 80-hour-weeks, young bankers are known to work 100-hour weeks, or more.

Despite attempts to limit the grind at places like JPMorgan, one bank seems to be leaning fully into long hours: Sage Kelly, 53, co-chief executive officer at Cantor’s investment bank 'jokingly' told Bloomberg: "“I just left the floor and told someone that I’m happy to buy them a cot because they need to come in on Sunday and not leave until Friday." High japes indeed.

Meanwhile...

Blue Owl blocked redemptions in one of its earliest private credit funds, The fund is merging with a larger fund owned by Blue Owl but the fund being acquired may be priced at a 20% discount, leaving investors with losses. (Financial Times) 

Yann LeCun has specialised in machine learning since the 1980s and was the head of AI at Meta. LeCun thinks that LLMs are overblown and has been saying things like, “If you are a Ph.D. student in AI, you should absolutely not work on LLMs.” Meta has replaced him with a 28 year-old who's more enthusiastic. (WSJ)

Maybe ex-British Chancellor George Osborne will be the new chairman of HSBC. Osborne knows about China and intervened on HSBC's behalf as it sought to avoid prosecution in the US in 2012 on money laundering charges. (Sky)

It's Deutsche Bank's investor day. The bank is expected to set a new target of 12 to 13 per cent RoTE 2028, up from this year’s 10%, and to cut its cost-income ratio target from 65% to below 60%. (Financial Times) 

BlackRock is adding stockpickers to Systematic Total Alpha (STA), its top mathematical and data-driven hedge fund. It won't be charging pass-through fees but a variation on the traditional "2 and 20." DE Shaw charges 3.5 and 40. BlackRock doesn't plan to recruit externally for STA but to shuffle staff around internally. (Financial Times) 

Goldman Sachs added nearly 200 staff to its EU hubs over the past year. (Financial News) 

Tech companies, utilities, and other borrowers tied to AI are now the biggest part of the investment-grade market. Once, that was banks. (Bloomberg) 

Speaking of First Brands' unexpected bankruptcy, Jefferies' President Brian Friedman said, “fraud is conventionally not detectable in the real world”.  And yet, Apollo and George Soros spotted it. (Financial Times) 

Jeffrey Epstein listed Kathryn Ruemmler, Goldman Sachs' general counsel, as an executor on his 2019 will. She said: “I have nothing to do with the estate and have never served in any capacity relating to the estate.”(WSJ) 

Andrew, a 39-year-old who works in London’s fintech sector, has a base salary of £170k and puts £60k a year into his pension — £17k of which goes into salary sacrifice and the rest into a self-invested personal pension. (Financial Times) 

Water outages for millions of people across the twin financial centres of Canary Wharf and the City of London could be prompted by a single fault at the crumbling Coppermills water processing plant in North London. (Financial Times) 

Dating advice from Bill Ackman: "I thought I would share a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone that I found compelling. I would ask: “May I meet you?” before engaging further in a conversation. I almost never got a No." (X)

“I would talk to my friends, people I loved: ‘So what are you going to do when you graduate? And just watch as they would go pale, and utter out the word ‘McKinsey’ along with their soul.” (WSJ) 

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22  Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. 

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.