Vibe laundering, pt. 1: On Citrini Research, disclosure gaps & the architecture of influence

When content becomes credibility becomes capital and our brave new world

Buh bum buh bum buh bum. Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze starts with a tritone melody known as the devil’s interval that was banned by medieval church composers because the jarring dissonance sounded like the end of the world or the beginning of something that couldn’t be taken back. The dissonance is from the two notes of the octaves fighting each other for dominance, but somehow, miraculously, the discordant tones melt into something sensible and you’re nodding along and the song starts making sense, even though you can’t explain why. The dissonance conjures itself into music through the slow layering of elements that have no business working together until suddenly they do, which is just like the conjuring a speculative work of fiction published on Substack this weekend seemed to do in moving markets as a result.

After all, a work of fiction on a Substack and massive financial losses are elements that typically have no business working together (as far as I know). What I am about to describe is not illegal.

On Sunday, February 22, Citrini Research published a piece called “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” on Substack. It is a fictional work billing itself as a memo from June 2028 that uses a legal architecture it charitably refers to as speculative fiction while meriting none of the literary prowess that earns the label. Charting the devastation that happens when AI works too well, the Citrini memo tells us unemployment is staggering, the S&P is down 38%, and that the authors seemingly write like large language models themselves (or is it the other way around?). The work also names some companies specifically by ticker. It went out on Sunday night and by Monday the article had sixteen million views on X. By market close the selloff had spread well beyond companies named in the report. Chaos. Sheer chaos. Dramatics, etc. DoorDash fell approximately 6.6%. American Express down roughly 7%. KKR down approximately 9%. Blackstone down 8%. CrowdStrike, which the report did not name, fell roughly 10%. MongoDB, also unnamed, dropped approximately 11%. The Dow fell 821 points. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF hit a new 52-week low. And Citrini, who I need to send a fruit basket to as thanks, blocked me on Twitter because of my critiques of the writing itself. So yeah, a lot happened, and then it got even more fun as Michael Burry waltzed entered the chat and shared the report on X stating “And you think I’m bearish.“

We love to see it (do we?) when the Big Short guy is signal-boosting a Substack post about AI killing the economy. Bloomberg, Fortune, TechCrunch, CNN, CNBC, and at least twelve other outlets ran coverage by end of day. Won’t someone think of the children of the future, or at least the burrito taxis feeding them since no one knows how to cook or doesn’t feel like it? Even DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang responded on X, saying “We definitely believe agentic commerce will be transformative to the industry. The ground is shifting underneath our feet.“

Read that again, folks - a named CEO whose stock dropped nearly 7% felt compelled to respond publicly to a Substack post framed as fiction. When I ask won’t someone think of the children, I really should be asking - won’t someone think of the burrito taxis? Apparently no one is.

Of course, the piece contains a disclaimer doing extraordinary work stating that “What follows is a scenario, not a prediction” and in the acknowledgements “Thanks to Sam Koppelman of Hunterbrook for his help with proofreading.”

I want to name something. Influence that moves markets without triggering the legal definitions of manipulation. Information that isn’t nonpublic and isn’t false but becomes significant through the channels it passes through. The slow accumulation of legitimacy around a position until it becomes what reasonable people think. I’m calling it vibe laundering because I saw it somewhere once and it stuck with me, plus I just want to name a damn movement and my other effort is in getting people to call Alex Karp surveillance daddy. Vibe laundering is how influence passes through enough reputable channels that it comes out clean, so it’s like money laundering but for narrative. It is the arbitrage of converting content to credibility to capital conducted in plain sight.

The first rule of vibe laundering is that you don’t talk about vibe laundering, so what I’m going to do in this 1st article is explore how it happens in the case of Citrini by showing how corporate structures with a capital raise that would normally trigger disclosure obligations can be structured to avoid every single one of them, then how disclosure of positions gets paywalled so the public sees the market impact but not the exposure behind it. In part 2, I’ll show finally how all of this sits in a legal architecture that was built for a world where the people moving markets had to tell you what they were holding.

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I. What you see is what you get (hypothetically): the role of disclosures and Citrini Research (the Substack), Citrinitas Capital (the business entity), and what’s in between

Citrini, née Van Geelen, is a former Los Angeles paramedic and regrettably like the author a graduate of UCLA, after which he left medical school (read: dropped out) to pursue entrepreneurship by launching a holistic healthcare venture in 2013 that was acquired by a PE firm in 2018. By 2023, he started Citrini Research on Substack and he has over 100,000+ followers on X and subscribers on Substack, making him the number one finance writer on the platform. Citrini has appeared on many media outlets many times saying many things, but since it’s late and I’m tired and I have many more interesting things to say, tldr, he’s well-known, has no actual proper finance background (just like moi) and somehow made it from the middle class bottom to Substack paid tier. Which is what brings us to what happened after the fictional June 2028 memo was published and the market sell-offs occurred (hey, could be due to tariffs, eh?).

Here’s what none of the seventeen outlets that covered the sell-off mentioned, however, or failed to for some reason, which is that Van Geelen is not just a Substack writer. He is also the managing principal of an entity that raised $5.05 million from accredited investors two months before publishing a piece of speculative fiction that moved billions in market capitalization. Let me back up for a moment to explain what the two branches of Citrini’s business interests are.

1. Citrini’s consumer-facing Substack is the paywall entity of Citrini Research where he shares the Citrini index model portfolio. This is the Substack where users need to pay upwards of 499 dollars a year to receive posts.

2. Citrini’s business interests are in an entity known as Citrinitas Capital Management Inc. a Delaware corporation formed in 2023 with offices at 515 Madison Avenue, 14B, New York, NY 10022. It does business as both “Citrini Research” and “Citrindex.” Three SEC EDGAR records exist for it, and under CIK 2089797, two Form D filings show under Regulation D, Rule 506(b) with one in October 2025 and one in December 2025. The third record is for a small position Van Geelen’s entity holds in with RoboStrategy, Inc., a closed-end fund investing in private robotics and embodied AI companies.

Though Citrinitas Capital was formed in 2023, it was only in October and December of last year that new filings appear on EDGAR. On October 21, 2025, the new filing is for $1,000,000 reported sold with one investor. The security type is listed as “Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE).” The filing lists two related persons with James Van Geelen as executive officer and director and Nicholas Reece as executive officer.

On December 2, 2025, the amended filing is for $5,050,000 total reported sold with five investors. It is still a 506(b) and SAFE set-up with zero sales commissions and zero proceeds paid to named executive officers.

Interestingly, on January 26, 2026, twenty-seven days before the speculative fiction was published, a Form N-2 registration statement was filed for RoboStrategy, Inc., a closed-end fund investing in private robotics and embodied AI companies. The fund holds positions in Figure AI, Apptronik, and six other venture-stage robotics companies. It is managed by Mechanism Capital with total assets of $147.5 million. Listed among the selling stockholders offering shares for resale is Citrinitas Capital Management Inc. with 50,000 shares (about 0.25% of total shares outstanding).

That means Van Geelen’s entity invested in a robotics fund holding humanoid robot companies, then published a speculative scenario in which AI and automation cause mass unemployment and economic collapse. The fund bets on the companies building the robots while Citrini’s memo back to the future in June 2028 - a work of speculative fiction - bets on the terror of what those robots do to the economy that they cravenly crater. Both positions can be true simultaneously and both can also make money simultaneously, from different directions, on the same thesis, since that’s what hedging is, right?

Yet as far as I’ve found, this position is not disclosed in any subscriber-facing material nor is it mentioned in the February 22 work of speculative fiction. It is on a public SEC filing that nobody has connected to Citrini Research because nobody has looked, apparently? I hope I’m wrong, and I definitely need more coffee.

The fund’s adviser (FP Strategies LLC) is a registered investment adviser in Puerto Rico that charges a 2.5% management fee on gross assets and holds positions in private companies like Figure AI and Apptronik. It was organized in May 2025 with operations starting in September 2025, and is trying to go public via direct listing in 2026.

Now, I think it’s worth pointing out that SAFEs are how startups raise capital. It is not how a hedge fund raises capital (correct me if I’m wrong, please). A pooled investment fund/hedge fund would file form D with “pooled investment fund interests” checked, but Citrinitas filed with “Other: SAFE.” The most conservative reading is that the capital was raised into the management company itself as corporate financing, not as a fund vehicle, but it’s just a reading, not the reality, I cannot be sure and neither can anyone else unless they have more information. At $5.05 million, none of the standard institutional disclosure triggers apply.

That means there is no 13F obligation, form ADV on the Investment Adviser Public Disclosure database nor FINRA broker-dealer registration required.The corporate structure of Citrinitas Capital sits well below every disclosure threshold that would typically apply to someone in a position whose publications move billions in market cap. But these are not normal times since the pandemic era new normal really wasn’t kidding around about it.

On the citricap.com mainpage, the website describes the entity as “an asset management and investment research firm focused on capturing momentum in thematic equity while utilizing shorter term derivatives strategies to protect against drawdowns.” The website’s access is restricted to accredited investors who are presumably sophisticated people.

On the Citrindex model portfolio, which Van Geelen markets as tracking “Citrini Research’s core portfolio with live updates on positions,” the legal terms say performance data is “hypothetical and presented for illustrative purposes only” and “does not represent the performance of any actual account or investment.”

On Fortune’s website, a report shows Citrini claims 200%+ returns on his “real-world investment portfolio” though the terms of Citrini’s website say the performance is hypothetical. Both are published, so it sounds like the tension between the real and the hypothetical are a tension that sits in the open like a tritone nobody wants to name but we’re all hearing.

Eventually it may become pleasant, one supposes, if this dissonance pays off? Buh bum buh bum buh bum. But with disclosures seemingly more opaque than clear, one wonders - how to launder vibes through impact? Positions, naturally.

II. Vh1’s behind the music, but make it behind the Citrini Research paywall

Examining the positions put behind a paywall costing hundreds of dollars a year is a point of entry into understanding vibe laundering from content to capital conversion through credibility. On Substack, the Citrindex model portfolio includes a basket called .AISHORTS: AI Standalone Short Basket. In late January 2025, Van Geelen made the AI basket approximately 50% short SMH. On Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast he publicly discussed shorting Blue Owl and private credit companies. Blue Owl dropped 3.3% on February 23. The report named Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo. They dropped 6 to 9%.

The model portfolio as of February 24 shows net exposure of 98.9% long. None of the companies named in the report are individually shorted. The Citrindex lost approximately 0.4% on February 23. The subscriber-facing product lost money on the day the report moved (hyperbolically) billions.

These are facts that cut against a trading-profit narrative, which is a good thing. But this is what those facts do not answer. There is no legal requirement that the model portfolio and whatever Citrinitas Capital Management is doing with its investor capital be identical. The model portfolio is what subscribers to the Substack see, whereas what happens inside the corporation is not publicly visible. The corporate structure does not require it to be. Whether Citrinitas held positions that benefited from the February 23 selloff is a question that cannot be answered from public sources to the best of my knowledge. If I am wrong, let me know please, and I will correct/update this accordingly.

The February 22 report contains no per-report position disclosure, and the site-wide terms contain only a blanket statement that team members “may have existing long or short positions.” To be clear, this is not the same thing as per-report disclosure. What happens when there’s free distribution of market-moving research through speculative fiction, but paywalled disclosure of positions? And taken a step further still, behind the paywall, there’s a corporation with no window at all? The vibes, they are a launderin’.

III. Is this real life, or is this just fantasy, caught in a landslide where hedge funds proof-read materials before publishing

Sam Koppelman co-founded Hunterbrook, a company that owns both a newsroom (Hunterbrook Media) and a hedge fund (Hunterbrook Capital). Their standard operating procedure is per-article position disclosure, which materializes in the form of disclosures on Hunterbrook piece I can find opens with a variation of something like “Based on Hunterbrook Media’s reporting, Hunterbrook Capital is short $XYZABC at the time of publication.” It is clear, consistent, and prominent.

The Citrini-Hunterbrook relationship is not new. In July 2025, they jointly published a report on Teradyne’s robotic arms deal with Amazon, and when it was published on Hunterbrook’s platform, the disclosure plainly at the top declared long Teradyne. The stock rose 6.3% that day.

Now look at February 22 with the speculative fiction of the June 2028 back to the future memo - it was published on Citrini’s Substack and Koppelman’s involvement was characterized as “proofreading.” There was no Hunterbrook Media article published because why would they publish it there? There is nothing to disclose, no position, just a speculative work of fiction involving financial markets.

The different disclosure architecture for trades and team-playing is interesting to ponder here. They are the same players with the same impact as influencers but the gap between the hypothetical and the real is also the gap between who publishes what and where. In theory, couldn’t Hunterbrook have also published it on their platform? I’m not sure of that, but it would be interesting to find out. Also intirguing would be whether Hunterbrook Capital held positions in any of those stocks in the speculative work of fiction published on Citrini’s Substack over the weekend. Has anyone asked or know?

My point here is that if there’s a real trade, like Teradyne, then the collaboration is published on Hunterbrook’s platform with disclosure at time of publication. Yet the hypothetical speculative work of fiction - which is a collaboration due to their involvement and proofreading yadda yadda - well, it was published on Citrini’s platform. Named stocks moved 3-11%. But there was no disclosure at publication. This also raises another question - Koppelman had advanced access to a written work of speculative fiction that named specific real stocks and subsequently made an impact that moved real (hyperbolic) billions. No public disclosure exists that answers whether Hunterbrook Capital held positions in any of those stocks. No journalist has asked. Prove me wrong here folks, because like I said, vibe laundering has to do with not talking about vibe laundering, but making it happen through an architecture of opacity in disclosures and positions.

Now: is any of this not kosher?

IV. Is any of this illegal? Nah, bruh. The Hamas Hospital Principle

Is vibe laundering legal, illegal, halal?

In a galaxy far, far away, local internet celebrity Roon recently posted on X/Twitter about what is called the “hamas hospital principle.“ Summed up, this was about how bad actors hide weapons wherever the sacred cows are. It works because nobody suspects the hospital, and that’s where the rot starts where you don’t see it. That’s how institutions which get coded as evil get scrutinized and watched precisely because everyone assumes they are the compromised ones when the reality is different.

Now consider how hedge funds file 13Fs while independent Substacks file nothing but copy and taxes for income for the 13 people on the website who make actual money, and then you have things like Fortune or the mass media, and Fortune is not required to file anything, except for better copy, one hopes. Fortune and other mass media, of course, boost credibility, so the credibility is the point and the cover just like Roon described.

So is any of this illegal? The honest answer is that nobody knows as securities law genuinely lacks an agreed-upon definition of manipulation. A Duke Law Journal article called “Legitimate Yet Manipulative” notes Congress deliberately avoided defining it. Like porn, the SEC has been running on “I know it when I see it” for ninety years. Prosecution happens when the heat gets loud enough, but vibe laundering and the architecture I’m describing is by design something that keeps it way below that volume.

Interestingly, the publisher exemption from the Investment Advisers Act (Lowe v. SEC, 1985) protects publishers who offer “impersonal, disinterested commentary” though the “disinterested” prong becomes a point of consideration possibly when the publisher also runs an investing business, or when a publisher is also the managing principal of a Delaware corporation that raised $5.05 million under Reg D. Crucially, the SEC’s 2015 no-action letter emphasized the test requires commentary not “timed to specific market activity.” I saw crucially because I’m hoping you know what the hell that actually means, because law, like language, can be ambiguous. So legal precedents are helpful to consider, and the most instructive enforcement precedent is Andrew Left from what I’ve found.

In July 2024 the SEC and DOJ charged Left and Citron Capital not for publishing bearish research but for misrepresenting his trading positions. Left told followers to sell while he was buying, which is apparently the line. Left got caught because he lied, but the vibe laundering architecture I’m describing doesn’t require lying, it requires structuring and siloing.

After all, we’re in a brave new world where you can use a Substack instead of a 13F, SAFE as your mechanism instead of a fund, and speculative fiction published instead of research on a platform that normally only publishes research.

What is a collaboration in one play is proofreading in another. The design of vibe laundering and its cumulative effect is a system that produces nearly the same market outcomes as Citron’s impact while sitting outside the enforcement frameworks that caught Left. Also, what is up with these citron/lemon evoking based names, is there no room for other fruits with something like Pampelmousse Partners?

I say all this keeping in mind that 61% of investors under 35 use finfluencer recommendations when making decisions, yet to my knowledge, the SEC has brought zero enforcement actions citing Substack. In 2024, SEC chair Gary Gensler testified that if the SEC stayed flat-funded “our ability to find bad actors is at risk.“

Vibe laundering in plain sight because there’s nothing illicit about it seemingly and the cops are understaffed anyways. Citrini is one example of the conduit nature between credibility and content that converts into capital conversion - there’s far more to it I will explore in part 2. There, I will explore possible pathways and architectures of vibe laundering and its manifestations as they apply from here on out by using a big surprise and guest stars. Stay tuned.

Disclosure: Definitely not financial or legal advice or allegations, just vibes. Contact me at ani@anibruna.com

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