Why Robinhood’s CEO Is Still BULLISH on Bitcoin

Are you ever worried about the billionaire tax here in California? >> I try not to think about it very much. Um, yeah. Yeah. And again, it's it's one of those things where um Yeah. I mean, California has this interesting kind of referendumbased structure where if you get enough support, um, even if the governor or local politicians or you know the the people support or are opposed to something, you can get on the ballot anyway. I think the predict we have a prediction market on this. >> So, you could hedge yourself in a way. >> Technically, I could, although that's not one of the deepest markets. Um, but yeah, I think I think it's it's showing it as a minority, so hopefully that does hold. >> What would change in your life if there was a billionaire tax? >> Well, a couple of things. Um, one, I think the real risk isn't to me personally, although obviously it would not be amazing. Um, it's to the ecosystem here, right? Um, so I think I think the real risk is it could be like a own goal for California because there's basically been two industries that California hasn't just been leading the country but has been leading the world in many cases. One is entertainment industry, Hollywood, >> uh, and and that's just gotten decimated in the past 10 years, right? and and a lot of it is policy decisions that are own goals, not giving incentives to people to shoot and film and to hire people locally. So then they're flying to Atlanta or Canada or Eastern Europe. And you know, it's hard to break this network, but I think that what's happened in Hollywood has shown that that network can be broken. If you have filming and studios moving elsewhere, and then eventually the talent and the directors and actors move elsewhere, and then you get to a point where, you know, they're not even having the award shows in in LA because nobody lives there anymore. So, I think there's a real danger of that. Could that happen to the technology industry? Um, I think it was looking fairly bleak for technology in San Francisco during COVID. People were talking about moving to Texas, moving to Florida and AI kind of resuscitated things, but um I think what happened in LA shows that we shouldn't take uh this for granted. Yeah. what what the real risk is. You know, I think a lot of people will nobody's going to want to be taxed every single year, 5% of their wealth. And these taxes do tend to start uh very very popular, but then eventually they cover everyone. Um, and over time I think you could actually get to a situation where the lost revenue from people paying moderate taxes. Um, but doing them consistently is is much higher than the one-time hit of like taxing someone once and them leaving the state. uh and a lot of people have already left the state actually before the the initial taxation would hit. So even the threat of this happening has been has been so severe that some people have have bailed in relatively large numbers pretty significant taxpayers. >> If a billionaire tax passes on a personal level, what would that do to you? Would you just be forced to sell some of your stake in your company? I think it depends a lot on implementation and some of it is uh yeah some some of it hasn't been precisely >> laid out >> laid out um yeah but I think a lot of people would be forced to I mean the bulk of my wealth is Robin Hood shares so um on a cursory reading I think a lot of people would have to sell shares in their companies. >> Do you keep your Robin Hood shares in Robin Hood? >> Uh no. Um, yeah. >> Too many eggs in one basket. >> No, no, no. It's It's not because of that. It's just because currently >> you got a 3% AATS transfer fee to some other things. It's like, oh, well, >> that's I'm I'm I'm saving it for when uh yeah, for for rainy day. Um uh no because uh my shares and the shares of our our um uh employees are administered by um there's like special requirements for how to administer employee stock purchase plans and uh what are called 10B51 plans which is I can't just freely trade my Robin Hood shares right I have to trade them under a specific plan that's filed in advance advance. Yeah. Because of material non-public information regulatory reasons. >> Yeah, that makes sense. >> So, so there are uh companies that deal with this uh and it's like a B2B thing like I will actually uh I will actually create a deal with you know a p a preo company to manage their ESP to manage their 10B51s and I become the the vendor. >> Do you trade on Robin Hood? >> I do. Yeah. >> So you you'll like wake up, check the app, make a investment. But also, what's interesting is when you sign up for Robin Hood, you have to check the boxes that no one else does, right? Like when I'm signing up for a new brokerage, I say no, no, no, no. I don't know anyone that's a 10% owner in a company or this or that. Like I'm not affiliated by any means with like like I say no to all those disclosures. But you actually have to say yes. How does that change on a personal investing way? >> I have to be really careful. uh trading individual stocks. I think ETFs are uh are are pretty simple and pretty clean. Uh crypto for a while I was doing a lot of crypto because I love uh I love crypto, right? I love trading. I love like being in the trenches with people. A lot of trenchers. Um I don't post on Reddit anymore, sadly. >> Anymore? Okay. >> Uh >> yeah, at one point I was a I was a Redditor. Uh early on in my Robin Hood journey. I think I got off of Reddit. Um, but uh, yeah, crypto has been kind of nice because um, yeah, it's it's a it's a fun trading product. Futures was nice when we launched it. Prediction markets as well, but yeah, individual stocks. Um, yeah, there's there's a lot of restrictions. So, >> what crypto do you have and own? And again, I I don't want to get into uh recommendations, but um I I have a pretty diversified portfolio. Yeah. To be honest with you. >> Are you bullish on Bitcoin? >> You know, Bitcoin is singular in a lot of ways, which makes it special. It was the first asset. It was the original memecoin, right? The brand of it is is quite strong because nobody can ever you you can create lots of Bitcoin imitators, but nobody can ever take the position of being the first and and most trusted. It's the, you know, main coin that companies think about as they're building out crypto treasuries to diversify against inflation and and do all sorts of things. So, yeah, long-term, I'm bullish on Bitcoin. I think it is singular and I think that gives it an advantage over comparable coins, but yeah, I can't tell you >> if it's going to hit a million or anything like that. >> One thing I want to ask you is that recently there is a Bitcoin hack with the cold wallet and Bitcoin was stolen. How do you make sure that if let's say I deposit Bitcoin on Robin Hood that that cryptocurrency is safe and that on your end there couldn't be a hack or that like there's an employee who just makes a mistake who types in a wrong little number and like something gets out there and then >> I think there's defense in depth what's called defense in depth with with these things. So without getting into the exact details of our crypto custody infrastructure um >> because there are a lot of a lot of hackers out there um >> you don't want to have too much of your crypto easily accessible to people. Uh, in fact, the lion share of it should be in cold storage where you have to go and like get pieces of paper ideally and not exactly how it works, but it should just be like not connected to the internet and highly secure. >> So, so that way even if there was >> an issue with a hot wallet, it covers a a very small minority of of crypto assets. uh then you have to constantly make sure that you're hardening your infrastructure, you're watching out for and preventing uh possible like security breaches and incidents is very very important for >> uh in this environment because you have mythos and fable and the AI tools are >> if there is a vulnerability you can't rely on it being just hard to find or it being too expensive. So that before AI tools, it used to be that, you know, you wouldn't have to worry as much because you had to worry about these state sponsored actors that would go after the softest, largest targets. >> Yeah. >> And in reality, you know, there's much there's banks that hold trillions of assets that have poor relatively poor cyber security posture. So they're just, you know, being attacked everywhere. But now, you know, it's so cheap to spin up another job that you really have to make sure that there's no holes. And I think uh you have to do that with like penetration testing, internal red teaming, and also uh using the AI tools themselves to scan and attack you like they like they were an adversary. So I think um we invest a lot in this and um we're fortunate you know to to to be at the frontier of a lot of these tools and to actually um yeah spend a lot of resources and a lot of our mind share in in securing all these things and the I think the surface area is always rising right now. We have Robin Hood chain we have all of our DeFi products we have of course the traditional business as well as crypto. So investing in security is a huge priority. Now, really quick, every business is asking themselves the same question. How do we make AI work for us? The possibilities are limitless, but guessing is too risky, and sitting on the sidelines is not an option. Because one thing is certain, if you're not doing it, your competitors are already making their move. And that's where our sponsor Netswuite by Oracle comes in. 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