TechCrunch published a piece on his story.
- A hedge fund that returned 439% through June just sold most of its public stock portfolio to Citadel.
- Leopold Aschenbrenner, 25 and formerly of OpenAI, built Situational Awareness in 2024 on one call, that scaling AI would force a build-out of chips, compute, memory, and energy.
- So he bought the suppliers, and SK Hynix, Sandisk, Bloom Energy, and Nebius Group each fell more than 30% in a month once investors stopped waiting for that spending to turn into revenue.
- Borrowed money multiplied every point of the drop, taking assets from a $45B peak down to roughly $10B after Ken Griffin's firm took the holdings.
- Aschenbrenner called the selloff a buying opportunity and asked clients for fresh capital, which never arrived.
- What survived is the private book, led by an Anthropic stake worth $5B in a company last priced at $965B and expected to list as soon as October.
FT: Leopold Aschenbrenner's (Ex OpenAI researcher) $20B hedge fund, Situational Awareness, is seeking fresh capital after leveraged AI losses. The move follows ...