FTX 2.0. Situational Awareness loses 35 billion dollars in a month

If you are wondering why stock markets performed so poorly in July, the reason is partly due to Leopold Aschenbrenner, a 24-year-old from Germany who learned stock and crypto trading from—you’ll never guess—Sam Bankman-Fried of the massive crypto platform FTX.

24 year old Leopold Aschenbrenner just blew up his $45 billion fund by going all in on the AI trade.

He previously worked for Sam Bankman-Fried and Sam Altman. What are the odds that he was hired by two lying psychopaths back-to-back?

This smells like a total psyop by Citadel… https://t.co/PTbZsgPZcr pic.twitter.com/S7ns2NRa48

— Financelot (@FinanceLancelot) August 1, 2026

Bust

Aschenbrenner worked for FTX in 2022 and subsequently lost his job when the major crypto platform went bust. Undeterred, he focused on AI and soon landed a new position, this time at OpenAI. In 2024, he wrote an essay entitled “Situational Awareness”. It became a hit within the industry.

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Leopold stated that he wanted to start his own leveraged investment fund which would focus on AI-related stocks. Various board members from OpenAI, Anthropic and other tech companies gave him millions of dollars to invest.

Things went extremely well for about year and a half, and his fund (named after his essay) grew into a true behemoth worth $45 billion at its peak, about a month ago.

However, due to the market correction affecting AI stocks and the fact that Leopold had invested with fourfold leverage, he lost around $35 billion in July. The value of his fund dropped by 67%.

Ken Griffin of the renowned investment firm Citadel decided to take over the remainder of Situational Awareness, and the US media are already calling the insane loss “FTX 2.0.”