The 25-year-old researcher fired by OpenAI turned $225 million into $5.5 billion in one year

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Former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner was fired in 2024 for "leaking," subsequently published a 165-page AGI paper, and founded Situational Awareness LP (SALP). His public holdings ballooned from $225 million to $5.52 billion within a year, a nearly 24-fold growth that has drawn significant attention. (Context: Clearing NVIDIA to buy fuel cells: The logic behind the 25-year-old genius trader's $5.52 billion AI fund) (Background: Anthropic spends $200 billion on Google Cloud over five years; two AI startups consume half of the orders from the four major cloud giants) - SALP fund holdings grew from $225 million to $5.52 billion in one year, a nearly 24x increase; founder Leopold Aschenbrenner is only 25 years old. - Holdings exclude NVIDIA, focusing on AI physical infrastructure: power, storage, fiber optics, and former Bitcoin mines transitioning to HPC. - Today's portfolio divergence: SanDisk +16.6%, Intel +14% lead the gains vs. CoreWeave -11.4%, as the market reprices AI bottlenecks. The termination letter was sent from OpenAI's HR department in the spring of 2024. The recipient was a German-born researcher, Leopold Aschenbrenner, and the reason cited was leaking confidential company information; he refused to cooperate with the internal investigation. In Silicon Valley, being fired from a top AI lab usually means the end of your career. You have signed more NDAs than the length of your resume, and the circle is so small that the person interviewing you next is likely a former colleague of the person who fired you. Two months later, Aschenbrenner released a 165-page paper titled "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead." The content was related to everything he saw inside OpenAI: the timeline for AGI is faster than anyone expected, and the world is not ready. Eighteen months later, his eponymous fund, SALP, saw its public holdings balloon from $225 million to $5.52 billion. 24 times, in one year. Leopold Aschenbrenner's resume reads like a guide on how to escape from high-profile companies. Before OpenAI, he worked at the FTX Future Fund—yes, the same fund Sam Bankman-Fried used to package his "Effective Altruism" persona, the faucet responsible for investing in a bunch of AI startups that are now worth a fortune. FTX imploded in November 2022 with one of the fastest collapses in financial history; $8 billion in customer funds evaporated, and SBF is now serving time in federal prison—he has 25 years to serve. Aschenbrenner was about 21 years old that year. He didn't stay in the rubble of crypto; he turned and walked into the doors of OpenAI. Then OpenAI pushed him out. Most people's careers wouldn't survive either of these events. He survived both, then started a fund—but it's no longer a small seed-stage fund; it is the fastest-growing AI-themed fund on Wall Street over the past year. The mission of the FTX Future Fund was to invest in the future with long-term thinking, yet it didn't even survive a quarter itself. What Aschenbrenner picked up from those ruins wasn't money; it was a methodology. The paper, referred to directly by the industry as "SA," is neither academic trash nor PR material. In it, Aschenbrenner draws a prediction no one dared to make: he states that AGI is not twenty years away, but could arrive in the latter half of this decade. And when it arrives, the bottleneck won't be algorithms, datasets, or talent. It will be electricity, chips, fiber optics, cooling systems, and physics. The paper exploded between Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Supporters called it "the most sober analysis of the decade," while opponents called it "the revenge fantasy of a fired employee." A year later, his fund provided the answer with a 24x return. Everyone is scrambling to invest in "companies that make AI," including OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, with a combined valuation of over $2 trillion. Aschenbrenner saw another layer: no matter which company eventually creates AGI, they all need the same things. Electricity, more electricity. Data that can run on fiber optics. Training sets that fill up SSDs. Cooling systems to dissipate heat for a million GPUs. He turned his paper into an investment thesis. SALP was established in 2024, with Q4 13F filings showing holdings of approximately $225 million. By Q

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