Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev isn’t scared of meme stocks

The Robinhood cofounder discusses Roaring Kitty’s return, the gamification of trading, and why he’s bullish on crypto, despite SEC scrutiny.

Keith Gill (aka “Roaring Kitty”) returned to social media this summer. Three years earlier, the Reddit influencer had helped sparked a meme stocks craze among retail investors that led to the GameStop stock short squeeze. The surge in stock price was a disaster for online brokerage platform Robinhood: The company halted the trading of GameStop and other stocks in January 2021 for a day and then only let consumers close out trades on the stock, barring them from placing new ones. Robinhood and its cofounder and CEO, Vlad Tenev, faced accusations of market manipulation by angry retail investors. Roaring Kitty, meanwhile, went quiet and stopped posting.