Here's a fun exercise: name a CEO who got publicly humiliated on live television by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, interrogated by Elon Musk on Clubhouse, dragged before Congress like a financial services piñata, watched his company lose $3.7 billion in a single year, saw the stock he'd just IPO'd collapse 85% from its peak — and then, somehow, turned the whole thing into a $68 billion company printing nearly $2 billion a year in profit.
That's Vlad Tenev. And whether you think he's a visionary founder executing a generational pivot or a serial over-promiser who got lucky with a bull market, the Robinhood story is one of the most fascinating corporate redemption arcs in recent memory.
Let me walk you through how it happened, why the numbers are genuinely insane, and why none of this may matter if the thing that made Robinhood famous — democratizing Wall Street — turns out to be the same thing that brings it all crashing down.
The App That Made Wall Street Free
Before Vlad Tenev became the most hated man in retail investing, he was something much less interesting: a Stanford math grad building high-frequency trading software for hedge funds. Along with his co-founder Baiju Bhatt, he spent his early career on the institutional side of finance — the side where trades cost fractions of a penny and nobody thinks twice about execution fees.
Then they looked at the other side. The retail side. Where regular people were paying $7 to $10 per trade just to buy a single share of Apple. The same institutions Vlad and Baiju were building software for were executing millions of trades for essentially nothing, while a first-generation college student trying to invest her graduation money was getting charged ten bucks for the privilege.
The injustice of it was almost comically obvious. So they did the comically obvious thing: they decided to make stock trading free.
They called it Robinhood. Steal from the rich, give to the poor. It's the kind of branding that either makes you a folk hero or becomes supremely ironic when things go sideways. For Vlad Tenev, it would eventually become both.