The Rise, the Fall, and What Comes Next: Leopold Aschenbrenner
Today I want to talk about a name that sits squarely at the intersection of my two biggest hobbies: Leopold Aschenbrenner.
Born in 2001, the German-born Aschenbrenner has an impressive academic and professional record. He graduated valedictorian from Columbia University in economics and mathematics-statistics. He then worked at FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of FTX, a company now remembered for its collapse. After that, he joined the Superalignment team at OpenAI, one of the most important companies in today's much-hyped AI world.
I. The firing
In April 2024, Aschenbrenner was fired from OpenAI over an alleged information leak. He denies the allegation; who is right, of course, we don't fully know.
So what exactly had he leaked? According to Aschenbrenner, the incident was a "preparedness, safety, and security" draft he had sent to three outside researchers for feedback. In his own words, the document had been scrubbed of sensitive information, and such sharing was entirely routine at OpenAI at the time. The part the company deemed confidential was a single line in the document: a statement that AGI, artificial general intelligence capable of performing any mental task a human can, was being planned for 2027-2028. Aschenbrenner says that information was already public.
To him, the real issue was something else. Some time earlier, he had written a security memo to the board, arguing that OpenAI's security was severely inadequate against the theft of model weights or key algorithmic secrets by foreign actors. He drew particular attention to China-linked industrial espionage. After that memo, he received a warning from HR, his team's loyalty to the company was questioned, and shortly afterwards he was shown the door. By his own account, at the moment of his firing he was told that "the reason this is a firing rather than a warning is the security memo."
OpenAI denies this. Company spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said they appreciated the concerns Aschenbrenner had raised but that they had not led to his departure; she added that while they shared his commitment to safe AGI, they disagreed with many of the claims he later made. In other words, the two sides tell completely different stories. One interesting detail: a month after Aschenbrenner's firing, the Superalignment team dissolved entirely; names including Ilya Sutskever left the company.
II. The rise
Two months after his firing, in June 2024, he published Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, a 165-page essay series. Its core thesis, roughly: AGI could arrive around 2027, which would require a massive buildout of chips, memory, data centers, and energy infrastructure. The text became something of a required reading in Silicon Valley.
Then he put his money on that thesis. In July 2024 he founded a hedge fund of the same name, taking investment from names like Patrick and John Collison, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. The fund returned over 1000% since inception, and its assets reached $45 billion. The portfolio was built on exactly what he had written: AI infrastructure stocks like SK Hynix, Micron, CoreWeave, Nebius, and Sandisk.
III. The fall
But there was a problem: the fund was using leverage of up to 400%. In July 2026, AI stocks fell sharply, and his short positions against software stocks turned against him too. Margin calls came from the banks one after another. To raise cash, he was forced to sell his entire public equity portfolio at a discount to Ken Griffin's Citadel. Within a few weeks, the fund's assets dropped from $45 billion to roughly $10 billion.
The tragicomic part is that all of this landed on his wedding week. On the weekend the portfolio was being liquidated, August 1, 2026, he was marrying Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
IV. What comes next
And today? He does not look like a man who has given up. In a letter to investors, he framed the episode as "we took the steps needed to fight another day" and said he considered it his duty to draw the necessary lessons from the experience. Just days after the collapse, on August 5, he made a new $400 million investment in an undisclosed private company. Together with the $100 million he had put into the same company a month earlier, his total commitment reached half a billion dollars.
What exactly he has left, we don't know for certain. Funds must report their US-listed holdings to the SEC quarterly; but the most recent filing we have is from the end of June, a snapshot from before the collapse. We won't see the post-July picture until November. And these filings don't cover stakes in private companies at all; where a significant part of the portfolio is believed to sit.
So the man who evaporated $35 billion at 24 was back at the table within a week. What happens next, nobody knows; but in stories like this, the rise is usually followed by a straight loss, and the story ends there. That is exactly why I am so curious about what he will do.