The Fall of Situational Awareness: A $100 Billion Blow-Up in 24 Hours

When Martin Shkreli got a call late Friday offering him $100 million worth of Anthropic stock, he raised an eyebrow. "Sometimes when you want to sell $4 billion, you don't come out and say you want to sell $4 billion. You come out and say you want to sell $100 million." That offer was the first public signal that something catastrophic was unfolding at Situational Awareness, the hedge fund run by Leopold Aschenbrenner that had grown from roughly $5 billion in investor capital to a peak of $45 billion in assets — almost entirely on a single, massively levered bet on AI infrastructure.

By the time the weekend was over, the fund had been liquidated. Three firms — Jane Street, Millennium, and Citadel — were brought in to bid on the remains. The buyer of the public book reportedly walked away with an instant $3 to $4 billion markup. Aschenbrenner, who had been the toast of finance just two months earlier, was forced to sell his entire portfolio at a fire-sale discount. And he was getting married that same weekend.

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