Robinhood's Vlad Tenev Wants You to Vibecode Your Way Out of the Permanent Underclass (original) (raw)

The night before my interview with Robinhood cofounder and CEO Vlad Tenev, I rewatched Dumb Money, the 2023 comedy about the GameStop saga that captivated a quarantined America during the pandemic. In the film, written by Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum, a goateed Sebastian Stan plays an oily and hapless caricature of Tenev, who found himself in hot water when trading abruptly shut down on his gamified stock-trading platform, sending an army of angry retail investors at him with pitchforks.

The next morning, I received a voice note from a friend who could provide some nice fodder for a sequel. She’d met a man at a fancy wedding who told her about hanging out with Tenev at a yacht party. When he jumped in the water, my friend said, he was allegedly followed moments later by the splash of his bodyguard. “It’s just funny because his whole thing is being a man of the people,” she told me.

The Vlad Tenev I met at Robinhood’s Meatpacking District offices last week was somewhere between that caricature and the man of the people his company’s name would suggest. Energetic and affable in a Burberry jacket and a rose gold Rolex Sky-Dweller, Tenev was eager to talk about the seemingly endless products his company has been shipping lately: a platinum credit card (“you should feel like James Bond”), family accounts (“we’re trying to get everyone to stay in Robinhood and also for them to get their parents”), and, well, at least the possibility of some involvement in Trump accounts (“if [the Treasury] were to make an announcement”...they’d “want to be the one to make it”).

When I asked Tenev about the bodyguard anecdote, his comms director swooped in tersely, “I think he just wanted to have a swim.” Tenev, however, did not deny it. “I first got security in 2019,” he told me with a shrug, after Robinhood users started showing up to the office with customer service complaints. Things have ramped up organically from there, he told me, along with his net worth, which is currently around $5 billion. “The United Healthcare thing was very scary,” he said.

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Tenev shows off the company's new Platinum Card: “You should feel like James Bond.”

Bloomberg/Getty Images

Tenev finds himself in a unique position among his fellow Forbes listers, in that his wealth has been accumulated on the back of a populist message. Robinhood, which was founded on the idea of democratizing access to investing, has always played on the popular resentment of wealthy investor-insider types who might be partying on yachts with Tenev today.

This month, Robinhood launched the next iteration of this vision: Robinhood Ventures, a closed-end fund that promises to open access to private companies to Joe Schmo—and with them, the kinds of returns previously accessible only to venture capitalists.

It’s an intriguing portfolio, full of companies that have long been on my radar but always out of reach for anyone besides my sources in VC, including the cloud platform Databricks, AI-data-labeling start-up Mercor, health-tracking ring-maker Oura, and supersonic flight company Boom.

In a way, it’s a large-scale version of the secondary markets that have sprung up around hot investments. So-called “special purpose vehicles” bundle small checks from regular people, are laden with layers of fees, and are usually only accessible through personal connections. (In 2022, private texts surfaced between Elon Musk and Jason Calacanis, in which Musk chastised his buddy for “marketing an SPV to randos.”)

I asked what Tenev would say to the critics who suggest Robinhood Ventures is just exploiting this FOMO to sell access to so-so companies at unrealistic valuations and extract onerous fees.

He scooted into the chair next to me and pulled out an orange iPhone to show me a video of a skit he performed that pokes fun at those exact concerns. “The goal of Robinhood Ventures is not just to open the doors to private investing,” says tiny Vlad on the screen, “but to blow them completely off the hinges.”

“Did you like the acting?” he asked eagerly once it was finished. RVIclosedover11RVI closed over 11% down on its first day of trading and has bounced around since—which gets to another inherent issue with this model. VCs are used to working on years-long horizons, while antsy retail investors were already panicking on Reddit about losing RVIclosedover111,000 in just a few days.

Still, Tenev is hopeful that this breakthrough will allow savvy retail investors to access a (relatively) early piece of tech booms, the same way apps like Robinhood have allowed some to make life-changing wealth on public assets like Nvidia, Tesla, or even Bitcoin. (Of course, the flipside of that is the unlucky schmucks who catch the bust side of the cycle. Robinhood, many would argue, helped spark the degenerate gambling economy we know and love to hate today. Remember: According to industry research, a tiny minority of day traders are able to outperform the market—and most actually end up losing money.)

“[Robinhood Ventures is] probably a better investment than, in my opinion, cryptocurrencies or the prediction market,” John Cole Scott, president of Closed-End Fund Advisors, told me this week. But he still advised “using lottery money” for such investments rather than your kids’ college funds.

Later this year, retail investors will have another chance to play their hand against the house with the much-hyped mega IPOs of OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic. All three are expected to go public this year at hundreds of millions or even trillion-plus valuations. Tenev has been on a bit of a public crusade lately against companies that delay going public until they are 12-figure behemoths.

“The upside accrues to a smaller and smaller group of wealthy insiders that just keep getting wealthier,” he told me last week. Meanwhile, he argued, “retail investors are getting screwed.”

He believes there’s another reason for big AI companies to go public sooner. “If you’re a normal person, you’re literally seeing zero upside from everything, only downside. My job is going away, I’m being replaced, they’re building data centers in my neighborhood.” If they’re allowed to reap some of the rewards, Tenev told me, they might also be more willing to leap to AI companies’ defense in regulatory battles—the same way online crypto armies mobilized to defeat crypto legislation.

I asked him to weigh in on the idea that AI will relegate a massive portion of society to what AI researchers have come to call the “permanent underclass.”

“I think inequality probably will continue to increase,” he said, but also argued that people across every stratum will enjoy a higher standard of living. He predicted an “explosion of entrepreneurship” in which anyone with an AI coding assistant could start a billion-dollar company. Imagine, he told me, I could start my own Vanity Fair, solo, from scratch? (No thanks!)

I pointed out the problem with one-man unicorns: Doesn’t society benefit more from a billion-dollar company that employs hundreds or thousands of people than a billion-dollar company that employs a single person?

Tenev asked me to consider a third possibility: “Hundreds of thousands of single-person unicorns. Probably the best option, right?”

One thing that seems certain in this new economy: There will be no shortage of demand for good yacht bodyguards.