Two months later, he published the 165-page essay “Situational Awareness,” which quickly became required reading in Silicon Valley. In it, he argued that artificial general intelligence would arrive much sooner than most investors expected, and that the real winners would not be consumer AI applications but the unglamorous pieces of infrastructure powering them: chips, memory, data centers, electricity, cooling, and networking. Software, by contrast, would become commoditized.
By the end of 2024, at just 22 years old, he had launched a hedge fund named after the essay. That November, the firm raised $100 million, according to The New York Times. The thesis proved so profitable that by the end of May 2026, the San Francisco–based fund was reportedly up more than 1,000% after fees since its inception. Situational Awareness quickly attained cult status. Rival hedge funds and even retail traders began mimicking Aschenbrenner’s trades, piling up stocks after he bought them and dumping positions after he sold.
But returns like that rarely come without extraordinary risk. According to CNBC, the fund operated with up to four times leverage, leaving little margin for error.
Then the market turned.
Because the portfolio was financed with heavy leverage, relatively modest declines began triggering margin calls from lenders.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Aschenbrenner agreed to sell approximately $3.5 billion of the firm’s Anthropic stake to a consortium of venture capital investors last Wednesday before reversing course. Instead, according to the Journal, Ken Griffin’s Citadel agreed to purchase the bulk of the fund’s public equity portfolio, providing an alternative source of liquidity.
Citadel CEO Ken Griffin in Oslo, April 28, 2026.Carina Johansen/Getty Images
All of this unfolded just days before Aschenbrenner and Balwit were scheduled to marry in picturesque Carmel-by-the-Sea, surrounded by Silicon Valley heavy hitters, many of whom were also Aschenbrenner’s investors. It was, by all accounts, a quintessential Bay Area wedding, complete with breakout rooms for social networking (the prompt was supposed to be investment ideas and trends, but given the events of the prior week, the couple opted for conversations about life and philosophy instead of discussions of finance). The event took place at a private, Tuscan-inspired estate overlooking the ocean, and after the ceremony, the 80 to 100 guests sipped on Napa Valley’s finest wine, with the DJ playing a Berghain-style set inspired by Aschenbrenner’s German roots—all of this happened in time for guests to have returned home and gotten into bed by 11 p.m. Amodei reportedly did not attend.