Elon Musk Grilled the CEO of Robinhood and it Was Just as Bananas as You'd Think
Any time the world's richest man records a two hour interview with the CEO of financial services company that's involved in the biggest news story of the moment, you can expect it to be interesting, to say the least. But when that world's richest man is also one of the world's most eccentric entrepreneurs who launches cars and human beings into orbit, and the CEO is running an app that is supposed to be helping the common investor but has been completely exposed as a puppet of the very rich and it's the eccentric billionaire who's championing the little guy? And the interview is recorded on something that sounds like they're talking over a Ham radio? That's when we have officially found ourselves living in the Bananaverse.
Here's the audio:
And here's the gist of the discussion:
Tech Crunch - Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and many other companies … made a vocal debut on a newer platform — Silicon Valley’s hottest startup right now, Clubhouse, which lets people join rooms to listen in on conversations between hosts and guests.
Musk, fielding a series of mostly softball questions, used the session to “talk to his base” on topics ranging from space travel, colonies on Mars, crypto, AI and Covid-19 vaccines. …
Asked about memes online he quipped: “He who controls the memes controls the universe” and it’s about what “influences the zeitgeist”. …
Does he try to sound crazy on Twitter? “I started crazy on Twitter,” he joked.
Then, a big switching of the gears, as “Vlad The Stock Impaler” was brought into the Clubhouse room to talk about the Game Stop phenomenon.
“Vlad” — more specifically Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood — began with an, at times, stumbling attempt to explain what happened last week but was eventually interrogated more thoroughly by Musk.
Musk at this point turned interviewer, and we’re here doing a bit more comprehensive transcribing because it’s worth keeping Tenev’s words in full.
“All right, tell us what really happened. Give us the inside scoop,” Musk said
“This has been a very surreal weekend and week for me,” said Vlad.
Vlad said “one of the really great things is all the people “coming out of the woodwork” to offer support for the company to offer advice. He said this was his first time using Clubhouse. He then made a jokey remark about being an adherent of the “simulation hypothesis”.
Musk brought him back: “The people demand an answer and they want to know the truth.”
Vlad said: “So there’s an introducing broker-dealer called Robinhood Financial, and that basically is the app that you know and love, it processes trades. You’re a customer of Robinhood Financial. Then there’s a clearing broker-dealer, Robinhood Securities, that clears and settles the trades. And then we have Robinhood Crypto, which is our Crypto business… All of these are different entities that are differently operated. So, basically Wednesday of last week. We just had, you know, unprecedented volume, unprecedented load on the system. A lot of these, you know, so-called meme stocks were, you know, going viral on social media, and people were people are joining Robinhood and there was a lot of net buy activity on them.” …
So, they give us a file with the deposit and the request was around $3 billion, which is, you know, about an order of magnitude more than what it typically is.”
Musk: This is not an unprecedented increase in demand for capital. What formula that they use to calculate that” …
Musk: Everyone wants to know, did something shady go down here? It seems weird that you get a sudden $3 billion demand, you know, at 3.30am in the morning. Just suddenly out of nowhere.
Vlad: I wouldn’t impute shadiness to it or anything like that….
Musk: Is anyone holding you hostage right now? …
Musk: To what degree are you beholden to Citadel?
Vlad: There was a rumor that Citadel or other market makers kind of pressured us into doing this and that’s just false. Market makers execute our trades, they execute trades of every broker-dealer. This was a clearinghouse decision, and it was just based on the capital requirements. So, from our perspective, you know, Citadel and other market makers weren’t involved in that.
Holy Schniekies. Even just trying to excerpt the most relevant parts of this has me exhausted. This sounds like the minutes of a meeting between two dementia patients feeding the pigeons from a bench outside the hospital. And I say that as a big Elon Musk guy. I wish like hell he was more aggressive in his line of questioning. Because this spineless thieving weasel needs to be grilled by a prosecutor, not just a friendly, visionary kook with superhuman business acumen. But still, what Cuntbag says is revealing enough.
There are two airtight ways to know when someone has something to hide. One is when he doesn't say anything. And the other is when he says way more than is necessary. That incomprehensible word soup of run on sentences that say nothing but have variation of the word "Robinhood" mixed in a dozen times is a dead giveaway.
When you're backed into a corner like he has been the last week or so, it's never a bad strategy to just ramble. Bury whatever you're trying to hide under a mountain of non-information. Drown the listener in a tsunami of jargon you know they won't comprehend. The truth is never this complicated. People with nothing to hide can explain their point of view in a way a 4-year-old will understand it. Real communication is not about talking; it's about being understood. When a mechanic starts talking about how the regulation frompostat needs to be calibrated to the altimax manifold and that's going to mean replacing the gonklator, grab your wallet. And your keys. And take it to some other place because you're about to pay for his new fishing boat.
Cuntboy Vlad here knows damned well that the people he ripped off are listening to this and making that expression the dog uses when he doesn't know what hand you put the ham in. Which is why he said it in this manner. Because if he came right out and explained how he gets a phone call at 3:30 a.m. from Citadel and then somehow wasn't pressured into screwing over the retail investors with their "meme stocks" to Citadel's benefit, we'd laugh in his face. And then strap him to one of Musk's rockets and launch him into the sun.
As it is, we'll have to hope we get to see him led away with his hands ziptied behind his back. But I'm not holding my breath.