Hedge Fund Manager Aschenbrenner Faces Second Margin Crisis as AI Options Bet Sours

Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 25-year-old hedge fund manager once dubbed Wall Street's "AI stock god," faces renewed pressure on the AI long positions he rebuilt in September after a July forced liquidation, raising questions over whether his call options will expire worthless. Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher who launched the San Francisco fund Situational Awareness in 2024, concentrated bets on memory names including SanDisk and Micron. The strategy returned as much as 439% this year and swelled assets to $45 billion before a roughly 20% technical pullback in AI hardware stocks in late July. Under about 4x margin leverage, that decline wiped out equity, triggering margin calls from brokers including JPMorgan and forcing sales at steep discounts, with core positions transferred to Citadel at roughly a 50% haircut. In a July apology letter, Aschenbrenner pledged to remove leverage and trade only with own funds or fully paid options. He partnered with broker Clear Street and spent hundreds of millions in premiums on calls on AMD, Intel, SK Hynix, SanDisk and CoreWeave. Since the September build, the seven core names have fallen an average 18.3%, with CoreWeave down more than a third. Third-quarter 13F filings due next month will reveal the options' true scale.