Leopold Aschenbrenner built one of the fastest growing hedge funds in recent memory. This week, that fund lost most of its value in a matter of days.
His fund, called Situational Awareness, held $45 billion in assets earlier this month. By Thursday, that number had fallen to around $10 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The drop came after semiconductor stocks fell and margin calls piled up. Aschenbrenner had reportedly used leverage as high as 400% on his public stock bets.
How the Sell-Off Happened
To meet those margin calls, Aschenbrenner was forced to sell his leveraged stock positions. Ken Griffin's firm Citadel bought the holdings at a discount.
The sold positions included hard hit names like SK Hynix and CoreWeave. Sources say about two thirds of the fund's holdings were long and short bets in public stocks.
The remaining third was made up of private company stakes. The largest of these was a multibillion dollar investment in Anthropic.
Before this month's decline, the fund had posted gains of more than 1,000% since it launched. The Wall Street Journal reported those returns last month.
Aschenbrenner launched Situational Awareness in July 2024. He raised $225 million in seed money from Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and investor Daniel Gross.
Who Is Leopold Aschenbrenner
Aschenbrenner was born in Germany to physician parents and later moved to the United States. He skipped several grades and graduated high school at 15.
He attended Columbia University, where he graduated as valedictorian at 19. While there, he co-founded the school's chapter of Effective Altruism.
That network led him to work at the Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of FTX, under Sam Bankman-Fried. He worked there before the crypto exchange collapsed in 2022.
In 2023, Aschenbrenner joined OpenAI's Superalignment team under Ilya Sutskever. He was later fired in 2024 after the company said he improperly shared confidential information, a claim he disputes.
Weeks after leaving OpenAI, he published a 165-page essay called "Situational Awareness." The essay argued that artificial general intelligence could arrive within years and made him a well known figure in tech circles.
Some critics have pointed to his lack of experience managing money before starting the fund. Others noted that a blow-up was expected given the fund's use of heavy leverage.
"A lot of people saw this blow-up as a matter of not if, but when," said Jerry Diao, who runs a Wall Street coaching firm.
Situational Awareness did not respond to a request for comment. An OpenAI spokesman declined to comment beyond past statements disputing Aschenbrenner's claims.
The fund's near collapse comes as Aschenbrenner prepares to marry Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, this weekend. The wedding was already planned before this week's losses.
