BREAKING: LEOPOLD JUST BOUGHT THIS!

Folks, Leopold Ashen Brener just came back with a massive bet after a very tough July that saw his fund down about $35 billion if you believe the reports. Well, he's back and making some very aggressive waves. And you're going to want to pay attention. In today's lovely video, we're going to break down number one, what's the latest on his fund, number two, why investors are actually rushing to give him money even after the massive draw down. Number three, what his public and private market bets are shaping up to be. And then number four, what this massive bet is that everybody's starting to talk about and you're going to see reported on week after week after week. And then lastly, we're going to go on to our sponsored segment on Astrote Corporation, ticker symbol ASTC, on the NASDAQ. Born from NASA and SpaceHab, Inc., Astrote brings space science and engineering to the real world. This small mass specttometry company built the only massspec explosives trace detector certified and field deployed in aviation security. and it's running in about 37 locations across 16 countries. I'll explain why you may want to put this company on your radar. And as always, if you're the one taking the ultimate risk, you got to be the one doing the ultimate frisk. Always do your own due diligence on all ideas presented. Okay, so let's start with the context. Now, if you haven't been following the Leopold saga, let me just give you a rundown. Mr. Leupold Ashen Briner is 25 years old. He was a researcher on OpenAI super alignment team and he left the company back in 2024. And then he wrote a 165page essay which is quite the read called situational awareness. In it he said AI capabilities were going to advance way faster than most people expected potentially towards AGI around 2027. And if that actually happened the world was dramatically underestimating how much physical infrastructure it would take to actually support it. compute, memory, networking, data centers, electricity, semiconductors, and eventually even the machines needed to manufacture said semiconductors. Now, this essay quickly went viral, and Liupold then turned it into a fund named after said essay. The situational awareness fund pulled in backing from some serious names across Silicon Valley. Stripe founders Patrick and John Cison, former GitHub CEO Nat Freeman, and for a while, the performance, as you might imagine, was just ridiculous. By the end of June 2026, the fund had reportedly returned 439% on the year, more than 1,500 juicy percent since inception. Now, his strategy was basically a huge bet on two things happening at once. You could think of it like a barbell. On one side, he went long the companies supplying the AI buildout, memory, data centers, energy, compute, names like SKH, Sandesk, and EBS, Bloom Energy, and then on the other side, he shorted the companies he thought AI was going to disrupt, mostly in software. And then he put leverage on top of both sides. And the leverage is ultimately what went wrong last month. According to Wall Street Journal, situational at times barred an extra three to four dollars or more for every dollar of capital it actually had. It was also using options to amplify returns further. But of course, leverage is a double-edged sword because in July, both sides of that trade started going against him. At the same time, AI infrastructure stocks collapsed and a lot of the softer names he was short rallied. So the longs went down, the shorts went up. And so a portfolio built to dramatically magnify returns ended up dramatically magnifying the losses. The losses got so bad that situational started getting margin calls from its lenders. The perfect example of how you can be completely right on a thesis, but if you use too much leverage, well, you have to be right in a very specific time span. Now, this is where Citadel's Ken Griffin walks in. So, Citadel goes and negotiates with them through the night and ended up buying the vast majority of Liupold's public stock portfolio. And according to the journal, Citadel got those shares at a discount of more than 10% of market value. Then almost immediately after the unwind, all of them bounced. Citadel's equity fund went on to gain roughly 14% in July, and their flagship Wellington fund gained about 6%. So here's the irony of the whole thing. Liupold's AI trade was not invalidated on thesis. No, no, no. He just lost the ability to hold it. And Citadel had the one thing that Leopold needed, and that's time. And time is bought by having extra capital. Now, the crazy part of the story is that all of this happened while Leopold was getting married. According to reports, it seems like the negotiations were going on at the wedding, which is crazy because most guys lose money after the divorce, not at the wedding. But this guy is literally early to everything. Jokes aside, nearly one week after getting wiped out, situational awareness starts getting a flood of inbound requests from investors who want to give him more money. So, think about this. This fund lost the majority of its assets in a couple of weeks. And all of a sudden, you have so many people calling them up and saying, "We want to give you more money." How does that work and why? Number one, the reported blowup number and the return number are two different things. The $35 billion figure is the drop in fund assets and a huge chunk of that was forced deleveraging and a sale of the book to Citadel. Not straight investment losses. Even after a 67% down July, the fund is still up roughly 80% year-to date. Most funds on Wall Street will not do 80% in a decade. So still incredibly incredibly impressive fund. Reason number two, Silicon Valley and Wall Street think completely differently. Wall Street's take on this has largely been this is what happens when a 25-year-old with no trading experience runs 400% leverage in a concentrated book. But Silicon Valley's take is very different. Silicon Valley's take is that the thesis here was right. The leverage was wrong. And the guy who wrote the defining document of the AI buildout is now available at a discount. So you could buy the dip on one of the most renowned investors of our time. Somebody that could end up being long-term like a new Warren Buffett. A tech Warren Buffett. Somebody that's not shy of tech place. Sequoa's Pat Grady has said publicly that he expects Ashen Briner, Leupold Ashen Briner to remain a central figure out there. Red Points Logan Bartlett has described a mood of people rallying behind him after this whole situation happened. The take on Wall Street is this guy failed. The take in Silicon Valley, people that actually want to make generational money and not just short-term returns. Well, in Silicon Valley, they're saying, "Look, this guy, he was right on the thesis and the thesis, that's what matters over the long run." people in Silicon Valley are way more driven by thesis than they are about short-term financial flows. So now he's on the bounce back and he said he takes full responsibility for these events and he's now deleveraged his fund. So let's talk about his current portfolio and we'll start with what he held on to and the biggest one by far is indeed Anthropic. And in May, Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion post money valuation. Situational awareness participated as a significant investor in that round. Now, this company did submit paperwork with the SEC to eventually go public. We don't know when it's going to be. It's rumored to be in the next 12 months, though. And once Anthropic successfully becomes a public company, well, that means that one of Situational's largest assets could become public at a crazy multiple. But Anthropic isn't the only bet. There's also Fluid Stack. Fluid Stack is a compute infrastructure layer. The easiest way to understand this business is that Frontier AI labs increasingly need absurd quantities of computing power. We're no longer talking about needing a handful of GPUs. We're talking about enormous clusters requiring land, electricity cooling networking financing, and potentially gigawatts of power. Fluid Stack offers all those beautiful things. And this tells you something very important about Leopold's thinking. He doesn't simply believe that AI models are going to become more valuable. He's specifically focused on the infrastructure, the infrastructure required, the infrastructure required to actually produce intelligence at a scale that is going to fulfill his overall vision. Then you have Matt X. Now, Matt X you could think of as building specialized AI chips designed around large language models. Earlier this year, Situational Awareness also co-led a $500 million financing round in Matt X. Now, Matt X is a solution to a question that many people have, and that question is, what happens if AI becomes economically important enough that Frontier Labs need silicon designed specifically around their own workloads? This is something that many believe could create a ton of value outside the front runner today, which is Nvidia. Situational awareness also joined Lux Capital in anchoring in approximately $1 billion in financing for physical intelligence, a robotics AI company. Now, this is extending his capital into a very different investment area. Now, physical intelligence is essentially working on foundation models for robots. Think about what large language models did for software. Instead of programming every response individually, you build a generalized model capable of understanding instructions and figuring out what to do. Now, this is supposed to take that to the physical world. You're not going to want to have to go through the hassle of telling a robot to move its arm 4 in to the left or rotate its wrist 40°. You're going to want to just tell it unload the dishwasher, make me a sandwich, give me a glass of whiskey. Simple things. And you want your robot to be able to take that prompt and figure out how much it has to move its arms and its relative limbs in order to do those things. That's when AI actually becomes physical. And you could start seeing robots in the home helping people in factories, warehouses, logistics, construction, maybe on the streets, policing us. And all of this is a massive increase in the total addressable market. But now it's time to talk about the one massive bet that looks set to cause the biggest bounce back in finance history. For several days, it came out that situational awareness had made a mysterious new $400 million private investment immediately after the fund's public market collapse. And we didn't know where the money went, but now we do. And that money went into Source Foundry and it was in addition to an earlier $100 million investment. So this position makes up $500 million in capital invested. So what exactly is Source Foundry? Well, Source Foundry was founded in 2025 and is developing new technology and equipment for manufacturing very specific types of advanced chips. Now to understand Leopold's reasoning and to really understand the specifics of this company, well, you have to understand the AI supply chain. If you follow that supply chain enough backwards, well, eventually you reach a tiny collection of companies responsible for producing the equipment required to manufacture cuttingedge semiconductors. And one of the most important that you might be familiar with is ASML. ASML's extreme ultraviolet lithography systems are critical tools for manufacturing many of the most advanced chips in the world. These are some of the most complicated machines humanity has ever mass-produced. Now, Source Foundry is essentially making a gigantic bet that there is room for another technological breakthrough in this part of the semiconductor stack. Now, I want to connect all this together and it's very important to connect everything because Leopold is a very algorithmic strategic and broad thinker. The entire strategy connects very very clearly. On the top you have anthropic which represents the intelligence. Then you have physical intelligence taking that intelligence into robots and the physical economy. Then you have fluid stack which is the infrastructure required to train and run increasingly enormous models. Then you have MAD X the silicon required to perform those computations. And then finally you have this new bet source foundry which is the equipment required to manufacture increasingly advanced silicon which would be very important in models robotics compute chip semiconductor manufacturing. So again, Source Foundry is related to these other four plays and is related to every thesis he's ever created as well as the very specific stocks that he sold to Citadel on a discount. Which then leads us to the inevitable question, which is Charlie, okay, this is all great, but these plays their private market. We can't buy it until they decide to IPO it and many multiples of the valuation that he bought it at. However, with Liupold, the value is actually following his thesis. And if you follow the thesis, you could actually buy the stocks that are fulfilling a lot of the same bottlenecks that Liupold is buying up in the private market. And the clearest way to do that, number one, is to look at the stocks that Citadel just bought the dip on. I made a whole video on that. These are literally stocks that Leopold wanted to hold but had to sell out of because of the margin calls. So that's like the most straightforward way to buy into his thesis. And then the second way is to target other companies that are specifically working to target the same bottlenecks. Liupold's positions are companies like ASML, TSMC, of course, Micron and SKH Highex, although they're very expensive right now. But again, the big takeaway of today's video is really to focus on the thesis because the thesis is what drives the best investing decision. the thesis that the future is going to involve more AI models, more inference, more compute, more accelerators, more HBM, more advanced chips, more fabrication capacity, more semiconductor equipment, more data centers, more electricity to power said data centers and eventually physical intelligence to power robots, so on and so forth. If you look at all this and you believe that the bill that is going to continue to head in the direction of more and more advanced AI, then it becomes very clear that investing in said AI and strategically doing so is incredibly valuable. I also made a video yesterday talking about our favorite stocks to solve for the very specific bottleneck of data centers. That was the video I posted yesterday, so make sure to check that one out. Very important to watch. And of course, we're going to keep you updated with all the ideas that we have. But anyways, let us know your take on Liupold down below. What are your favorite buys and sells in this current market environment? And now it's time for our sponsored segment. And now it's time for our sponsored segment on Astrotech, ticker symbol ASTC, on the NASDAQ. This is a small mass spectometry company that built the only massspec explosive trace detector certified and field deployed in aviation security. It's running in about 37 locations across 16 countries. And this year, its board approved a second front, a lunar resource program aimed at silicon 28 and helium 3 for for semiconductor and quantum computing supply. I'll break down the company and why you may want to put it on your radar and begin your due diligence. In security screening operations around the world, false alarms carry real cost. When detection equipment misidentifies everyday items as threats, the result is facility shutdowns, screening delays, and wasted resources across airports, cargo hubs, and border checkpoints. Astrotte Corporation, ASTC, has developed an alternative approach built on technology originally designed for space. Astrotte traces its roots back to NASA and SpaceApp. And its core innovation, the Astrote mass spectrometer technology, AMS technology for short, originated from a device designed to monitor the quality of the air circulating inside the International Space Station. That heritage matters. Equipment built for orbit has to be compact, lightweight, low power in reliable and extreme environments. And those same traits now define Astrot's product line. The AMS technology operates under ultra high vacuum, which eliminates competing molecules to deliver higher resolution and fewer false alarms. and the intellectual property behind it includes 16 granted patents along with extensive trade secrets. Most explosive trace detectors ETDs deployed at airports today run on ion mobility specttometry IMS and Astrotech believes customers are unsatisfied with that technology for good reason. For starters, IMS based ETDs often misidentify personal care products and common household chemicals as explosives causing facility shutdowns, delays, and wasted security resources. Their threat libraries are limited to only a few explosives of largest concern, and adding new compounds to an IMS library fundamentally reduces the instrument's performance, further increasing false alarms. Astrote's answer to all of this is the Tracer 100 developed by its first detect subsidiary. It is the world's first mass specttometry based ETD certified by the European Civil Aviation Conference and approved by the TSA for air cargo with a virtually unlimited and easily expendable threat library. The device has been deployed in approximately 35 locations across 16 countries spanning the United States, Europe, and Asia. Now, in terms of milestones, there's been a string of milestones. In June 2024, the TSA added the Tracer 100 to its air cargo security technology list, advancing it to stage two field trials. In January 2025, First Detect was awarded a research and development contract with the Department of Homeland Security for next generation explosive trace detection. In April 2025, Astrot fulfilled a $429,000 purchase order for six Tracer 1000 ATDs from a TSA approved contractor, marking the first TSA approved sale of the device. And in May of 2026, the Tracer 1000 achieved ECAC/EU G1 approval, meeting the highest European standards for aviation security, followed weeks later by ECAC certification for wand swabbing. Now, Astrot is structured to spin its core technology into multiple industries through wholly owned subsidiaries, each holding an exclusive license for its specific use. First detect for explosives and narcotics, trade detection for airports, borders, cargo, military bases, and law enforcement. A lab for mass spectrometers for the hemp market focused on optimizing distillation yields. Pro Control, real-time process control for industrial manufacturing and scan, rugged portable environmental testing for air, water, and soil. and breatht breath analysis screening for volatile organic compound metabolites. ALab's flagship instrument, the ALAB 1000D2, uses the company's maximum value process to analyze samples in real time during distillation. And during field trials, the solution improved ending weight yields by 20% or more. Pro Control brings mass spectrometry directly onto production floors targeting petroleum refining, industrial chemical manufacturing, food processing, neutral manufacturing, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and their Ncan meanwhile launched the Labrador HHGC in May of 2026, a handheld platform delivering parts per billion VOCC detection across air, water, and soil for on-site environmental work. And in 2026, the story took a turn few saw coming. In May, Astrotek's board approved a strategic lunar resource and infrastructure initiative targeting resource extraction, autonomous infrastructure, and future moonbased semiconductor and quantum computing applications. In June, the company submitted a proposal to NASA's commercial lunar payload services 2 program seeking approximately 20 million in non-dilutive NASA funding for phase 1 lunar technology demonstrations. As part of the shift, the board has also approved a process to explore a potential sale of First Detect, a move that would monetize the company's most established business as it pursues its space ambitions. Now, let's talk about the risks. Keep in mind that Astrot remains a small early stage company. Its newlyannounced lunar strategy is ambitious, unproven, and likely years away from generating revenue. Key risks include the possibility that the lunar initiative may not secure NASA funding or advances planned, while the potential sale of the first detect creates uncertainty around the company's most established business. The company has not yet achieved profitability and generates only modest revenue. And because Astrotech is not yet self-funding with a $200 million shelf registration on file, future capital raises could dilute shareholders and pressure the stock. So these are all things to consider. But anyways, with top tier European certification in hand, new products reach in the field and announce the proposal pending. Well, ESTC may be worth monitoring as this transformation plays out and putting on your radar. Anyways, make sure to do all of your own due diligence. Nothing in the segment is financial advice. Have a great rest of your day. We will see you in the next video.