Recap of 'AI Stock God' Leopold's Liquidation Saga: How Did Wall Street Sniff Out His Fund's Collapse? According to WSJ, on July 29, the CEO of family office Mannsion Group received a call in a taxi: someone representing Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund, *Situational Awareness*, asked if they were interested in buying its Anthropic shares, with the condition that the deal had to be completed 'overnight.' Mann immediately realized: 'No one sells Pre-IPO shares at a time like this unless they're desperate.' At its peak, Leopold's fund managed as much as $45 billion, leveraging heavily on long positions in chip and AI infrastructure stocks while shorting software stocks, achieving an impressive 439% annual return at one point. But in late July, as Chinese open-source models disrupted market sentiment, the fund's heavy positions in stocks like SK Hynix and Nebius plummeted, while shorted software stocks like Adobe rallied against the trend. This double whammy led banks to issue margin calls. The unraveling of the crisis was nothing short of dramatic: On Wednesday, July 29, *Situational* simultaneously pitched $500 million worth of Anthropic shares to potential buyers like Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Michael Dell's family office, offering a 20% discount with a 12-hour deadline. Greenoaks worked overnight to close the deal, which was scheduled for 8 a.m. the next day. Meanwhile, *Situational* was secretly negotiating with Citadel and Millennium to sell its public stock portfolio. In the end, Citadel acquired about $16 billion worth of public holdings at roughly a 10% discount. Aschenbrenner then informed the original Anthropic buyers that he had found a 'better solution,' leaving some investors quite unhappy. That same weekend, Leopold attended the wedding of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's chief of staff, Avital Balwit, in Carmel, California. According to attendees, a toast jokingly thanked Citadel founder Ken Griffin for 'making this day possible.' The fund's AUM has since shrunk to about $15 billion, and it has begun rebuilding its positions, recently investing $400 million in chip startup Source Foundry.