Leopold is Back! Big Tech Earnings, Defense Tech Deep Dive | Richard Craib, Trae Stephens, Blake Resnick

**Jordi Hays** (0:00)
You're watching TBPN.

**John Coogan** (0:02)
Today is Friday, July 31st, the end of the month, 2026 We are live from TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
We have a guest co-host today. Introduce yourself for those who don't know.

**Jordi Hays** (0:15)
Jordi's out again, I'm back.

**John Coogan** (0:16)
Yeah, we got Tyler in the Ultradome in the hot seat. Well, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. You're back, you know who else is back. Leopold Oshenbrenner's back. He says, you're gonna have to drag me out of SALP, out of Situational Awareness LP, because he's down but not out. Little beat up, but he shared a letter that's making the rounds thanks to some intrepid reporters on the TBPN team that posted this. He sent an LP letter that clarifies a lot of the questions. Yesterday, I mean, even internally, we were going back and forth on like, okay, he sold a bunch of the portfolio to Ken Griffin to Citadel. Does this count as a liquidation? Does this count as blowing up? And these are like sort of vague terms. Like, what does it mean to blow up? It seems like there was definitely a drawdown. The fund definitely was underperforming that month. But what does it mean? Is the fund gone forever? Is he going to work at McDonald's as some people were trying to make it seem like it was happening? Obviously, that's not gonna happen. He's gonna have a long career. Lots of people are rooting for him. I'm certainly rooting for him.
But there are some facts in this letter that we should read through. He writes, this is Leopold Oshenbrenner, to the LPs of Situational Awareness LP.
We let you down this month. We came closer to permanent capital impairment than is acceptable to us.
While we ultimately found a solution that protected the fund and you as investors, that was the sale of the public equity book to Citadel. There were some other structure going on to get liquidity.
He said, we ultimately found a solution that protected the fund and you as investors. Our intention in running the fund is to never find ourselves in such a position in the first place. Volatility is the price of long-term investment returns. Over the past two years, we have delivered outstanding results. That's 100% true. It was up, what, 1,000% at one point or something like that?

**Jordi Hays** (2:11)
Yeah, something like that. I mean, it got up to, what, 45 is the number, right?

**John Coogan** (2:15)
Yeah, 45 billion AUM from an original raise less than two years ago, I believe, up $250 million, which seemed crazy at the time. We're like, he's a young first-time hedge fund manager. He's got $250 million. That's crazy. Then pretty soon it was like, oh, he's got a couple billion. That's crazy. Then it was like, he's got tens of billions. Then he's got half a centi billion. So he says, over the past two years, we have delivered outstanding results despite occasional sharp pullbacks. Probably not the first time. There's been other pullbacks in the market and those have probably been simplified but never gotten to this level of actually distressing the fund in this way. He said, but our fund must always be structured such that we can take a loss and fight another day. That's a recurring theme in this. The writing in this letter is really good. Very clear, very direct, not being dodgy, very upfront.

**Jordi Hays** (3:11)
I love the way it's written. Almost like there's the PG advice to write very clearly. I think it was very kind of in that line.

**John Coogan** (3:18)
There's a lot of that in here, yeah. So he says, I will make it my mission to ensure that we learn the necessary lessons from this experience.
Here's where things stand. One, the portfolio experienced a significant drawdown over the course of July, which was exacerbated by extreme moves in core positions over the past week. Many AI names drew down by half or more while our positive long short spread reversed violently.
While we could say much more about how unusual the month was, we hold ourselves to a higher standard irrespective of market conditions. Two, as these moves proceeded, we started to see increasingly adverse trading in names publicly associated with us. So, this is the rumor that Martin Screlli was talking about yesterday, this idea that there's blood in the water.

**Jordi Hays** (4:05)
You can kind of sniff out if someone's hurting and then you kind of have an idea.