How Les Wexner, Victoria's Secret billionaire owner, made early investments in Atlantic Crypto, which then turned into CoreWeave, netting him a $720M stake
Forbes : X: @_iainmartin , @_iainmartin , and @hkanji X: Iain Martin / @_iainmartin : A 86-year-old retail billionaire (with a complicated legacy) might be one of the big winners from investing in the AI boom. Iain Martin / @_iainmartin : Wexner's massive stake in the $19 billion startup was revealed in a lawsuit filed by one of his investment advisers who is demanding a success fee after the Ohio billionaire's family trust sold $70m of Coreweave shares at a $7bn valuation last year. Hussein Kanji / @hkanji : A lawsuit reveals that an early bet on the company that would later become $19 billion startup Coreweave has made Les Wexner one of the largest individual shareholders in the AI unicorn https://www.forbes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Wexner's early backing of Atlantic Crypto preceded its evolution into CoreWeave, turning a private investment into a reported $720 million position and creating a $70 million liquidity event for his family trust. The adviser’s fee lawsuit makes an otherwise opaque early ownership stake visible.
The disclosure arrives as CoreWeave was already being profiled as a lean GPU-cloud provider with hundreds of clients, including Microsoft its early GPU-cloud customer base. Later reporting adds an important qualification to the company’s growth story: its revenue became highly concentrated among its largest customers its subsequent customer concentration.
First-order effects
- Wexner and his family trust gain a documented, valuable ownership position in CoreWeave, while the prior $70 million sale demonstrates that some of the stake had already become liquid.
- The adviser’s lawsuit puts the origin and scale of the investment under scrutiny, potentially determining whether a success fee is owed.
Second-order effects
- The disclosure gives prospective CoreWeave investors a clearer example of how early backers can monetize a GPU-infrastructure company’s valuation increase, even before a broader public-market event.
- As early holders sell or seek to formalize adviser compensation, ownership and incentive arrangements become more salient alongside CoreWeave’s operating growth.
Third-order effects
- If GPU-cloud providers continue to command large private valuations, wealth generated from early, nontraditional backers may become a more material part of AI-infrastructure ownership than founder stakes alone.
- The pattern also underscores a tension: financing and liquidity can accelerate infrastructure buildout, but concentrated customers and complex capitalization can make valuations sensitive to a small number of commercial relationships.
The trend: AI infrastructure is becoming an investable asset class in which early capital, compute capacity, and later-stage liquidity are increasingly intertwined.