AI'S NOSTRADAMUS SOLD $16 BILLION PAST MIDNIGHT. HIS WEDDING GUESTS ARRIVED THAT MORNING. by wednesday leopold aschenbrenner was trying to sell anything. he offered sequoia and greenoaks a $3.5b slice of his anthropic stake. it fell through. > grew up in berlin. columbia valedictorian at 19 > ftx future fund, resigned one day before the bankruptcy filing > openai superalignment, fired in 2024 over an alleged leak he still disputes > wrote a 165-page manifesto calling agi by 2027 and the infra buildout > seeded by the collisons, nat friedman and daniel gross > long chips/memory/power + anthropic, short software, 3-4x leverage sk hynix and coreweave cratered. the software short ran against him. margin calls came in from goldman, jpmorgan and bofa. patrick and john collison, the men who seeded his fund, sat in his office while he worked citadel and millennium past midnight. citadel won. before thursday's open griffin took the bulk of the $16b stock book at more than 10% below market. the cash went to the lenders. the fund lived on $10b. down 67% on the month, still up 80% on the year. six days earlier he had told investors the selloff was the best entry since early 2025 and opened the fund to new money on august 1. that money never arrived. his wedding guests did. he and the bride signed the same ftx resignation letter back in 2022. she is dario amodei's chief of staff. the ~$5b anthropic stake is the most valuable thing his fund still owns.

a horror movie made for $750,000 is about to become one of the most profitable films ever made. Obsession - shot in 20 days in Alabama by a 26-year-old YouTuber with no stars in the cast - is now eyeing a $250 million+ box office finish. that's a return north of 300 times its budget. it's already the highest-grossing release in Focus Features history. now look at what the industry spent that same money on: - Joker: Folie a Deux - ~$200 million budget. a punchline. - Mickey 17 - ~$118 million. forgotten in a month. - The Mandalorian & Grogu - $165 million, 7 years, the entire Lucasfilm machine. it's currently losing the weekday box office to... Obsession. Hollywood keeps insisting you need $200 million, a pre-sold IP, and a marketing budget the size of a small country to make a hit. then a guy with a camera, a wish-granting toy, and three weeks in Alabama outearned all of them on a rounding error of their catering bill. the most profitable movie of the year cost less than a single second of screen time in the average blockbuster. turns out audiences never wanted the budget. they wanted a good movie.