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It’s Sunday.
Leopold Aschenbrenner spent two years warning the world to prepare for an AI supercycle.
This week, the trade nearly swallowed his hedge fund.
Situational Awareness plunged 67% in July after leveraged bets on AI infrastructure stocks unraveled, forcing it to sell most of its public equity portfolio to Citadel.
Just days earlier, Aschenbrenner had called the selloff a buying opportunity and sought fresh capital.
The fund survives with roughly $10B in assets, including private investments in names like Anthropic.
But one of Wall Street’s fastest-rising funds has become a clear lesson about what happens when a strong thesis meets too much leverage.
Key Data Bites Over The Last Week:
Morningstar updated their list of the 9 best AI stocks to buy.
Chinese AI firm Moonshot is using a cluster of 20,000 Nvidia chips.
Big Tech AI spending has now surpassed $1T.
Fed held interest rates steady between 3.50% to 3.75%.
Starbucks posted same-store sales growth of 7.9%.
Nvidia is working on AI deals worth more than $750B.
Visa plans to cut 7% of its workforce.
EU plans to sanction record 1,600 firms for helping Russia.
Warner Bros. deal collapse would cost Ellison family nearly $10B.
Saudi Prince Alwaleed acquired 5% stake in Lucid Motors.
Apple plans to lease iPhones for $17.99/month.
U.S. economy slowed to 1.5% growth rate in Q2.
AWS posted its fastest growth in 18 quarters.
In today’s newsletter:
🥇 Apple Reclaims #1
😋 Anthropic Is Eating Software
🚀 Microsoft Profit Jumps
🔻 Meta’s Guidance Disappoints
🥤 Warren Buffett’s Coke Dividends
Let’s jump right in.
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Apple took a bite out of Nvidia.
The iPhone maker briefly reclaimed its place as the world’s most valuable public company with a $5T market cap this week.
Investors are increasingly rewarding Apple’s more measured approach to AI.
Rather than pouring billions into infrastructure, Apple is leaning on its ecosystem, hardware upgrades and built-in services to monetize the technology.
Meanwhile, Nvidia sits at the center of the AI spending cycle, with its growth heavily dependent on a small group of customers continuing to spend aggressively.
For now, Apple is giving investors a less capital-intensive way to gain exposure to AI.
Anthropic is compressing decades of growth into five years.
The company is on track for an estimated $71B in annualized revenue.
At that pace, Anthropic’s annualized revenue would exceed what Adobe and Salesforce generated combined over the past year.
Founded just five years ago, the company is already producing revenue at a scale that would place it among America’s largest businesses.
Few companies have ever reached this level so quickly.
Software’s newest companies are already challenging businesses that took decades to build.
Microsoft can’t build cloud capacity fast enough.
The company beat expectations in its fiscal fourth quarter as revenue climbed 18% to $90B and profit surged 31% to $35.8B.
Azure grew 43%, its fastest pace since early 2022, while Copilot reached 30M paid users, up from 20M last quarter.
Management expects Azure growth to accelerate to 45% this quarter as customer demand continues to exceed available capacity.
Additionally, the company plans to spend more than $50B during the quarter to keep expanding its infrastructure.
Even with that investment, the company expects to remain free cash flow positive this fiscal year.
Meta’s ads are booming, but its cash flow isn’t.
Revenue rose 28% to $60.8B in the second quarter and beat expectations, powered by $59.4B in advertising sales.
Earnings, however, missed as legal charges and severance costs weighed on the bottom line.
The outlook added to investor concerns.
Meta guided to $62.5B in current-quarter revenue at the midpoint, below consensus, while raising the low end of its 2026 capital spending range to $130B from $125B.
That AI buildout has pushed free cash flow down to just $784M from $8.6B a year ago.
Meta plans to use the capacity to train models, strengthen its core apps and launch new agents and products.
Overall, the company’s ad business remains strong, but investors are still looking for proof its AI spending will pay off.
Coca-Cola keeps getting sweeter.
The beverage giant beat expectations in the second quarter as revenue rose 7% to $13.4B and global volume increased 5%, helped by World Cup demand.
Coke also raised its full-year outlook and now expects comparable earnings growth of 9% to 10%.
The results are especially welcome at Berkshire Hathaway, one of Coca-Cola’s largest and longest-standing shareholders.
Its 400M shares generate roughly $848M in annual dividends, or nearly $100,000 every hour.
After holding the stock for decades, Berkshire has turned a simple consumer staple into one of its most dependable income engines.
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🤝 Tesla + SpaceX↗ – Tesla is reportedly weighing a sale of its China business to help clear the way for a potential SpaceX merger.
🇨🇳 Chip Independence↗ – China has begun mass-producing homegrown immersion DUV lithography machines, a technology crucial to advance chipmaking.
🤫 Privacy Suit↗ – The FTC sued Hims & Hers for allegedly sharing users’ health data with advertisers like Meta and Snap despite promising privacy.
📢 Bloomberg IPO↗ – Bloomberg executives have been having preliminary talks with bankers about a potential IPO.
📈 Revenue Surge↗ – OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees that July’s revenue run rate was higher than the company’s entire Q2 revenue.
Notable Companies Reporting Earnings Week of August 2nd, 2026:
Major Trades Published 7/27 - 7/31. Trades may be those of family members. [Source: Capitol Trades]
Buys
Jared Moskowitz (D)
Company: Applied Materials ($AMAT)
Amount Purchased: $3K - $45K
Sells
Sam Liccardo (D)
Company: Nvidia ($NVDA)
Amount Sold: $15K - $50K
Jared Moskowitz (D)
Company: S&P Global ($SPGI)
Amount Sold: $3K - $45K
Major Trades Published 7/27 - 7/31
Buys
Albertsons Companies ($ACI)
Sells
Airbnb ($ABNB)
Insider: Joseph Gebbia (Director)
# of Shares Sold: 2,093,303
$ Amount: $315,911,788
SEC Forms: [1]
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