Taking advantage of the slightly cooling Robinhood chain, let's talk about @vladtenev

The one who got American retail investors to “get on board for free,” and was later criticized by them in Congress: Vlad Tenev

This is the first article:

If you knew Vlad Tenev in 2021, your impression of him probably revolves around one thing:

Robinhood removed the “buy button” for GameStop, and then this CEO was summoned to Congress, explaining to the public why he wasn't a Wall Street mole.

But defining him solely by GameStop is like defining a trader by one margin call—it's indeed memorable, but the story is far from over.

Vlad was born in Bulgaria and immigrated to the United States with his family when he was 5 years old.

As a child, he witnessed what currency devaluation looked like. According to his recollection, his grandfather would exchange wages and pensions for copper pots, storing them in a cabinet at home.

While others saved in gold, his family’s savings method could also be used for cooking.

This experience later became Vlad's favorite story to explain the ideal of Robinhood: the financial system is not inherently reliable, and being able to control your own money is a superpower in itself.

He studied mathematics at Stanford, where he met future co-founder Baiju Bhatt while doing summer physics research. After graduating, he went to UCLA to study mathematics, originally intending to become a professor.

However, just a month into graduate school, Lehman Brothers collapsed.

Baiju called him: Stop studying mathematics; let's figure out how to make money instead.

The two started two quantitative trading companies aimed at financial institutions. According to their own assessment, both startups were “moderate failures.”

But the tuition they paid for their failures was not in vain.

They realized that Wall Street firms were already using electronic trading and low-cost infrastructure, while regular people had to pay $7 to $10 in fees to buy a few hundred dollars' worth of stocks, with accounts often requiring thousands of dollars to open.

Thus, in 2013, they founded Robinhood:

No commissions, no minimum deposit, stocks can be purchased with just a few taps on your phone.

They transformed something that looked like Windows 95 financial software into a product as smooth as a social app. Before Robinhood even officially launched, the waitlist swelled to about 1 million; it grew rapidly after going public in 2015.

By 2019, mainstream brokerages in the US had all dropped stock trading commissions to zero.

This is a credit that is hard to erase from Vlad: whether you like Robinhood or not, it did force the entire industry to turn a fee that had been in place for years into a free service.

But once financial products become as simple as scrolling through short videos, joy and risk often accelerate together.

Robinhood’s revenue did not come out of nowhere. The zero commissions are backed by customer cash interest, margin lending, and the revenue earned from payment for order flow by sending orders to market makers.

“Free” did not eliminate the business model; it merely moved the cash register to a place the user cannot see.

In 2020, Robinhood experienced system outages during severe market fluctuations; regulators subsequently penalized related Robinhood entities for issues such as order execution disclosure, misleading account information, options approval, and supervision systems.

Then came the GameStop incident in 2021.

As retail investors rushed into stocks like GME and AMC, clearinghouses imposed huge margin requirements on Robinhood. Robinhood later restricted the buying of certain stocks, igniting accusations that “Robinhood disabled the buy button for hedge funds.”

The SEC’s later market structure report did not confirm the narrative of “hedge funds ordering Robinhood to restrict trading”; the report pointed to clearinghouse margin and capital pressure instead; Robinhood subsequently raised $3.4 billion urgently.

However, "it was not a Wall Street conspiracy" does not equate to "Robinhood has no responsibility."

Users were unable to buy in at the most critical time, and the company had not adequately prepared capital, systems, and communication methods. Robinhood sold “financial democratization,” but when retail investors charged collectively for the first time, they found there was an invisible clearing wall ahead.

This contrast is more damaging to the brand than any conspiracy theory.

Vlad later admitted that, as a mathematician and engineer, he was used to expressing facts in technical language but did not realize that public crises are not mathematical defenses—you cannot just prove your logic makes sense; you must also ensure that angry people understand what you are saying.

In the same year, Robinhood went public at $38 per share. Vlad transitioned from entrepreneur to publicly traded company CEO and from “the one who breaks Wall Street” to someone Wall Street must now regulate.

Since then, Robinhood has clearly pivoted:

It is no longer only satisfied with being a stock trading app for young people but aims to become what is called a “Financial SuperApp.”

Retirement accounts, credit cards, banking services, professional trading terminals, cryptocurrencies, Bitstamp, prediction markets, private assets, stock tokenization, Robinhood Chain… the basic principle is: as long as it relates to money, it’s best not to leave Robinhood.

By the second quarter of 2026, the company disclosed it had 28.4 million funded customers and $369 billion in platform assets, with quarterly revenue reaching a record of $1.31 billion.

More interestingly, Vlad has also picked up mathematics again.

He co-founded Harmonic with Tudor Achim, developing a mathematical reasoning system called Aristotle, aimed not at making AI better at conversation but at enabling its mathematical and software conclusions to be formally verified. Harmonic claims Aristotle has reached the level of a gold medal in the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad.

While others may enjoy golf as a hobby while being a CEO,

Vlad’s side project is: to create an AI that can prove theorems.

Thus, Vlad Tenev is difficult to simply categorize as a “hero of retail investors” or a “villain of Wall Street.”

He is more like a radical product engineer:

He believes that all complex systems can be redesigned to make them easier for ordinary people to use; however, Robinhood's history also reminds us that lowering the operational threshold to zero does not mean that risks, clearing, and regulatory thresholds disappear as well.

His greatest achievement is making investment no longer feel out of reach.

His greatest controversy is also making investment seem too easy.

To understand Vlad is to understand the retail investor finance in the United States over the past decade:

Interfaces become simpler, transactions become faster, but the old financial pipelines still lay buried underground.

They are usually invisible.

When the market goes crazy, they emerge to charge a fee.

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