AI power couple marries in Carmel after groom's hedge fund nearly collapses

Eva Roytburg Fri, July 31, 2026 at 2:01 PM PDT | 3 min read

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Leopold Aschenbrenner is set to marry Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, this weekend in Carmel, California. Fortune first reported their engagement in October. According to the Wall Street Journal, the wedding is a lavish affair befitting the AI power couple: it begins with a colloquium of panels and breakouts, followed by a ceremony at a Tuscan-style villa, and concludes with a send-off to their honeymoon at a forest spa retreat.

However, the groom arrives at the altar after spending the entire week desperately trying to keep his fund afloat.

The Rise and Near-Fall of Situational Awareness

Aschenbrenner, known as the "Nostradamus of AI," built his hedge fund, Situational Awareness, to $45 billion in capital through concentrated bets on hot memory chip and data center names such as CoreWeave and SK Hynix. The Journal reports he was leveraged three to four times on these positions, borrowing three to four dollars for every dollar of capital.

For two years, the strategy worked. But during the week of Aschenbrenner's wedding, a black swan event struck. As traders grew concerned over AI infrastructure spending without clear returns, memory stocks—and even Big Tech names like SK Hynix and SanDisk—fell by 30%. The semiconductor sector experienced its worst month since 2002.

Rival traders identified his holdings and shorted them, the Journal reported, betting he would be forced to sell. Banks began demanding more collateral, prompting Aschenbrenner to sell stock to meet margin calls, which pushed prices down further. In a Thursday letter to investors, first reported by Reuters, he compared the situation to a bank run—"vulnerability begetting more vulnerability."

Emergency Measures and a Deal with Citadel

By Wednesday, Aschenbrenner was trying to sell whatever he could. Bloomberg reported that he approached Sequoia and Greenoaks about buying private stakes, including a $3.5 billion slice of his Anthropic holdings. That deal fell apart.

His backers, Patrick and John Collison (the Stripe founders), spent hours at his offices as he negotiated with Citadel and Millennium well past midnight, the Journal reported.

Ultimately, Citadel prevailed. Before Thursday's market open, Ken Griffin purchased the bulk of Aschenbrenner's public portfolio at more than 10% below market value, the Journal reported. Aschenbrenner used the cash to repay his lenders. The fund survived with just $10 billion, the Journal noted, keeping the Anthropic stake intact.

Aftermath and the Wedding

On Thursday, as guests began arriving in Carmel, Aschenbrenner wrote another letter to investors, the Journal reported. He stated that his shorts and leverage were gone, the fund was down 67% on the month, but still up 80% on the year. He was not liquidated, and the fund would not shut down. He offered one-on-one phone calls in the coming week—the same week he is supposedly on his spa honeymoon.

"I take full responsibility for these events," he wrote.

Now Aschenbrenner is at his wedding. His investors and colleagues are likely among the guests. He met his fiancée at the FTX Future Fund, and his fund was seeded by the Collisons, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. He shared an office with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel and hosted happy hours for OpenAI and Anthropic researchers, Fortune reported in October.

It is a small world. Neither Situational Awareness nor Anthropic responded to Fortune's request for comment. But Balwit has joked about the tight circle before. On X, she wrote that she asked her wedding planners to make it "European Garden," but noted it is on the cusp of the singularity. "Our wedding planners nod sagely, they are taking notes," she wrote. "They think we have lost it."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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