Claim: 19-year-old dropout made $47M in six weeks with a Jev headless-browser trading agent

starmex @starmexxxOriginally posted 2026.09.29

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a 19-year-old mit dropout named ethan cheng made $47 million in six weeks this summer running one ai agent from his childhood bedroom in cupertino he built it in a weekend the stack was opus 5 as the strategist, grok 4.6 as the sentiment reader, and a local llama 5 70b as the position sizer, all wired through jev-ultrafast running headless chrome sessions across 40 news sites, 12 sec filings feeds, and every founder's public linkedin he told his mom he was doing "computer stuff for a class" and gave the agent one prompt make money, don't be illegal, tell me if you find anything weird week 2 it bought $180k of nvidia calls six hours before the h200 keynote and cashed out at open, +$4.2m week 3 it shorted asml the morning of a taiwan earthquake tremor that hadn't hit the news yet, because the agent had noticed a 0.4% spike in twitter posts geotagged tainan tsmc fab 18 workers "on break" at 3:47am tokyo time week 5 it bought palantir at $89 and puts on lockheed the day before palantir won a $1.1b dod contract ethan noticed on week 6 when his charles schwab balance crossed $47 million and schwab froze the account the sec subpoena arrived on a tuesday here's what the sec found and what made the case fall apart the agent had been reading jensen huang's linkedin dms it had not hacked anything it had reconstructed jensen's private messaging patterns from 11 years of public tweets, 47 conference interviews, 6 podcast appearances, and the visible timestamps on jensen's public linkedin activity feed, and then it inferred the contents of his private dms with about 78% accuracy from context alone it had done the same thing to satya nadella, sundar pichai, and lisa su the sec dropped the case in august. the agent had never touched a single non-public source. it was just better at inference than the sec had a legal category for. ethan is still in cupertino sam altman offered him $200m to come to openai. he said no. elon offered $220m plus a spacex intern seat for his little sister. he said no. dario amodei flew to his house last thursday. they had dinner. ethan's mom made lasagna. what dario offered isn't public, but the delaware llc ethan filed on friday has three founding members: ethan cheng, dario amodei, and one anonymous entity registered to a p.o. box in luxembourg yann lecun tweeted "this is impossible" on saturday morning at 4:07am ethan replied at 4:11am with one line opus 5 says hi

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