OH. MY. GOODNESS.
CITADEL HAS BOUGHT A MAJORITY OF THE PUBLIC ASSETS FROM LEOPOLD'S SITUATIONAL AWARENESS FUND.
So...Citadel scares everyone on Tuesday about a surprise rate hike during FOMC that WE ALL KNEW was not going to happen...
On Wednesday, the entire market freaks out about the rate hike which causes the selling to compound on itself creating 50-70% drawdowns across the board in high beta semicondcutor names...
Which means Leopold who we now know had $45B of assets and was 400% LEVERED ends up being the sacrifice as he gets liquidated at what theoretically could be the bottom due to not having the margin requirements to keep solvent...
AND THE PERSON WHO CAUSED THE SELLOFF WITH THE RATE HIKE FEARS ENDS UP COMING IN TO BUY HIS ASSETS FOR 40 TO 50 CENTS ON THE DOLLAR.
By the way, Leopold is getting married this weekend. I think he wanted to make sure he wasn't getting margin called during his wedding.
A vet on wall street in Ken Griffin takes out the young new kid.
ABSOLUTE. CINEMA.
>Be Leopold Aschenbrenner
>24 years old
>Born ~2001/2002 in Germany
>Son of two doctors
>Attend the John F. Kennedy School in Berlin
>Convince your parents to let you fly alone to the U.S. and enroll at Columbia University at age 15
>Graduate valedictorian in 2021 at age 19 with a B.A. in economics and mathematics-statistics
>Co-found Columbia’s effective altruism chapter
>Do research at Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute and co-author papers on long-term risks
>Join the FTX Future Fund in 2022, then resign before the collapse
>Land on OpenAI’s Superalignment team in 2023 under Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike
>Write an internal security memo warning about industrial espionage and China risks
>Get fired in April 2024 over an alleged information leak (which you dispute)
>Two months later drop a 165-page manifesto titled Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead predicting AGI around 2027 and runaway superintelligence
>Watch it go wildly viral (even Ivanka Trump praises it)
>Found Situational Awareness LP in late 2024 with ~$225 million, backed by the Collison brothers, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and others
Bet heavily on AI infrastructure—power, memory chips, data-center proxies, Bitcoin miners, CoreWeave, Nebius, Bloom Energy, Micron, Sandisk and more—while running high leverage
>Compound the fund to an estimated $20–24 billion AUM by mid-2026 with ~439% net gains since inception
>Get engaged to Avital Balwit (chief of staff to Anthropic’s CEO) and live in San Francisco
>Then, in late July 2026, after a brutal AI stock rout (many positions down >35%), shorts moving against you, and margin pressure from up to 4x leverage, liquidate the entire public equity book—longs and shorts—in one massive block trade to a single buyer
And he did it all by writing a prophetic essay, going all-in on the power-and-compute bottleneck, and riding the AI wave harder and faster than almost anyone.
Leopold Aschenbrenner is absolutely insane