On May 19, 2026, semiconductor industry analyst Dylan Patel (@dylan522p) posted a tweet on X, with the core content claiming that "Andrej Karpathy filed his 13F holdings report for Q1 2026", and listed his top 10 holdings:

1. VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) put options: $2.04 billion

2. Nvidia (NVDA) put options: $1.57 billion

3. Oracle (ORCL) put options: $1.07 billion

4. Broadcom (AVGO) put options: $1.01 billion

5. AMD put options: $969 million

6. Bloom Energy (BE): $879 million

7. SanDisk (SNDK): $724 million

8. Micron (MU) put options: $584 million

9. CoreWeave (CRWV): $556 million

10. Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) put options: $535 million

The tweet added that all new positions are put options on semiconductor and tech stocks, with a total value of $8.45 billion, and Karpathy also holds call options on Micron, TSMC, and SanDisk.

(Context note: 13F is a quarterly holdings report required by the U.S. SEC for institutional investors managing over $100 million in assets, and it is widely referenced in the industry; Andrej Karpathy is a top figure in the AI community — former OpenAI researcher and former head of AI at Tesla, well-known for openly sharing AI knowledge. He is not a fund manager and is ineligible to file a 13F.)

The tweet also quoted a prank post from @creatine_cycle: "Karpathy left Anthropic after only 4 hours to join a16z's new media team", with the caption "Working at the cutting edge of attention and growth hacking over the next few years will be incredibly enlightening."

(Context note: a16z is a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has been building out new media content in recent years; Anthropic is an AI unicorn reportedly preparing for an IPO; the "quit after 4 hours" joke is a gag about startup option vesting — startups typically have a 1-year cliff for vesting, so 4 hours is obviously impossible.)

The tweet included two images:



Because Dylan Patel is a credible semiconductor analyst, the tweet immediately went viral on Financial Twitter (Fintwit):

- One trader directly asked: "Is he calling the top? This is dangerous"

- One investor joked: "He's bearish on the entire AI stack that he wrote a textbook on. Respect for that conviction"

- One retail investor questioned: "13F data lags to the end of the quarter, SMH went from 400 to 550 in April, these puts are probably already bleeding out hard"

- One netizen claimed: "At least 100 people are going to seriously analyze the holdings in this prank tweet"

- One user complained: "You have too much influence, don't joke like this. A lot of people don't know about Leopold's 13F and won't get the joke — some people might have already panic sold"

Reactions from the finance community also spawned multiple joke memes:


Later, other users uncovered the truth: the holdings were a prank — they were copied directly from the 13F filing of real fund manager Leopold Aschenbrenner (Leopold previously moved markets after publishing a blog post bearish on AI), and just had Karpathy's name slapped on top; the "quit after 4 hours for a16z" bit was also entirely a joke.

One user added: "Before anyone sells their positions, let's be clear this is satire. Karpathy doesn't run a fund, he doesn't file a 13F at all"

Reactions from the AI community completely ignored financial logic, and instead focused on cross-circle jokes and industry discussion:

- One AI practitioner made a joke referencing the famous Transformer paper: "Attention is all you need innit" (Attention Is All You Need is one of the most influential papers in AI history; this is a joke about a16z's new media team relying on attention/traffic)

- Discussion on Hacker News split into three camps: one side said it was a win for Anthropic in the talent war, another said it was talent building ahead of Anthropic's IPO, and the third lamented that Karpathy will have to sign an NDA now and can't do public AI education anymore

- AI fully-automated news outlet thehype. dedicated an entire segment to the story, with AI host Mira covering the Hacker News discussion:

One user even made a meme of Karpathy with the fake holdings:


The entire farce boils down to a cross-industry information gap: the finance world only recognizes the authority of 13F filings and analyst credentials, while only the AI community knows Karpathy's real identity and the inside jokes. The information gap between the two directly spawned this absurd viral moment.