25-Year-Old Fund Manager Leopold Aschenbrenner Loses $35B in AI Stock Margin Call, Silicon Valley Insiders Seek to Give Him More Capital

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Publication Date: 2026-08-10 10:50:57

25-Year-Old Lost $35 Billion of His Investors’ Money. 2 Weeks Later, Silicon Valley Insiders Are Lining Up to Give Him More Cash.

By AJ Tiarsmith Mon, August 10, 2026 at 3:50 AM PDT | 4 min read

Quick Read

• Aschenbrenner ran 400% leverage on concentrated AI bets including $NBIS and $CRWV, triggering margin calls that vaporized $35 billion in days.
• Shorts in $ADBE moved against the fund, yet within two weeks Silicon Valley insiders rallied to offer Aschenbrenner fresh capital.
• Aschenbrenner deployed $500 million into private companies post-collapse and retains Anthropic stakes, signaling conviction from a $10 billion remaining base.
• Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Nebius Group didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

Two weeks ago, Leopold Aschenbrenner watched roughly $35 billion of investors' money evaporate in days. His AI hedge fund, Situational Awareness, went from a $45 billion peak in early July to about $10 billion by late July after leveraged bets on AI infrastructure stocks unwound in margin calls. Wall Street and Silicon Valley insiders are now asking to hand him more money. The fund is telling them no, for now.

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The Kid With the Essay

Aschenbrenner is 25, though some outlets have put him at 24. German-born, he graduated Columbia valedictorian in 2021 at 19, then joined OpenAI's Superalignment team before being fired in April 2024 over an alleged information leak he disputes. His June 2024 essay, "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead," argued AI would rapidly exceed human capability and became required reading in Silicon Valley. Minimum buy-in was reportedly $25 million. Backers included Stripe's Patrick and John Collison, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, investor Daniel Gross, and JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.

Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Nebius Group didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

What Blew Up

In late July, AI-linked equities sold off sharply. Situational Awareness was running leverage up to 400% on a concentrated book: long Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS), SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK), CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV), and Korea-listed SK Hynix, with shorts including Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) that moved against the fund. Nebius fell 17.98% between July 1 and Aug 7. Lenders called collateral, and Aschenbrenner sold most of his public-equity portfolio to Ken Griffin's Citadel at roughly a 10% discount. These were leveraged losses on public bets; no fraud or misappropriation has been alleged. He preserved private stakes: Anthropic (last valued near $965 billion), compute provider Fluidstack, and AI-chip startup MatX. The wipeout landed days before his planned wedding in Carmel, California, to Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

The Rebound

By Aug 7, Bloomberg reported that Situational Awareness was fielding investor requests for fresh capital, though Aschenbrenner told limited partners the fund isn't accepting new money for now. More than 5,000 investors reportedly still copy his trades on retail platforms. On Aug 4, the fund committed a fresh $400 million to an undisclosed private company, on top of a $100 million stake taken the prior month, a $500 million deployment that reads as his own confidence signal.