Baiju Bhatt net worth
Number of divisions: 13
What is Baiju Bhatt’s net worth?
Baiju Bhatt is an Indian-American entrepreneur with a net worth of US$2 billion. He is probably best known for co-founding Robinhood, an online trading company with Vladamir Tenev.
Bhatt was born to immigrant parents in India and studied at Stanford University. Tenev was his classmate. Because of Robin Hood, they all eventually became billionaires. However, Bart’s fame is not without controversy. In 2021, his company came under fire for the infamous Gamestop crash, and many political commentators and financial experts accused Robinhood of manipulating the market.
early life
Baiju Bhatt was born in 1984 to Indian parents and they immigrated to the United States earlier. The Bhatt family is descended from Gujarati, an Indo-Aryan ethnic language group that is common in Gujarat, India. Baiju grew up in Poquoson, Virginia as a child. After graduating from high school, he entered Stanford University to study physics. Unsatisfied with getting a bachelor’s degree in physics, Bhatt went on to earn a master’s degree in mathematics in 2008. During his first job at Stanford University, Baiju and Vladamir Tenev became friends, and the two first started to develop their online trading platform ideas on their online trading platform. College life.
Profession
Although Bhatt sowed the seeds for future financial success at Stanford University, he will not venture to start a business for some time. After graduating from university, Bai Ju first worked with Tenev in a number of financial institutions in New York. The two specialize in helping companies build high-frequency trading platforms, which further inspired them to create their own independent online trading platforms.
This concept is built around the idea of professional traders and companies paying almost zero fees to execute transactions electronically. Tenev and Bhatt asked themselves why no one created a zero-commission online trading platform. When they couldn’t come up with the answer to this question, they decided to create their own online trading platform.
The other main source of inspiration came from the socio-economic factors of that period. Bhatt graduated from Stanford University at the height of the financial collapse in 2008, mainly because the irresponsible financial system was built on the mortgage crisis waiting to happen. Bai Ju then witnessed Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, which inspired him to make transactions easier and fairer for ordinary people. The core mission of Robinhood is to allow everyone to invest in the stock market and start making money. The clue is of course in the name of the company itself; Robin Hood is a legend, he is known for plundering the rich and giving alms to the poor.
Robinhood was officially born in 2013, with Bhatt and Tenev as co-founders and equal partners. By 2016, the zero-commission stock brokerage application has 1 million users. This number will grow astronomically in a relatively short period of time. By 2018, Robinhood has 3 million users. This growth is mainly driven by a clever referral program through which existing users can obtain free stocks in exchange for introducing new users.
(Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images)
This progress also witnessed a substantial increase in the personal wealth of Vladimir and Bai Ju. By 2018, both became billionaires. In addition, the company’s own valuation has risen to US$6 billion. That year, Bhatt delivered a speech at Disrupt SF 2019 and announced plans to launch an IPO (initial public offering) next year. Despite the stock market crash in 2020, transactions on the platform actually increased during that year.
Also in 2020, Robinhood raised US$280 million in venture capital led by Sequoia Capital, bringing the company’s valuation to US$8.3 billion. The other round of financing was conducted after D1 Capital Partners invested US$200 million in the company. As of 2021, Robinhood has more than 13 million registered users. The company has achieved tremendous development in less than 10 years.
dispute
Despite its success, Robinhood has been involved in many controversies over the years, and Baiju Bhatt has assumed most of the responsibility as the company’s public image. Order flow payments, security breaches, interruptions, and unlimited leverage all raise significant concerns.
One of the most tragic controversies Bhatt faced was the suicide of 20-year-old college student Alexander Kearns. Kearns committed suicide mainly because his Robinhood account showed a negative balance of $730,000, but it was later discovered that this was an error in the Robinhood system. Robin Hood subsequently faced a lawsuit from Carnes’ estate.
Another well-known controversy occurred during the 2021 Gamestop stock fiasco. Traders on Reddit can significantly increase the value of Gamestop stock by acting together as a trading block. As many senior investors and companies have been actively shorting this stock, some of the richest people in the world have lost billions of dollars. Robinhood’s losses were also serious, which prompted Robinhood to temporarily ban investors from trading Gamestop stock.
This move was widely criticized and regarded by many observers as market manipulation. The connection with Robinhood and Wall Street elites was exposed. It is clear that Robinhood represents the same hedge fund trader who shorted Gamestop stock. The whole collapse is a bit ironic, because Robinhood was originally established to make it easier for ordinary people to trade, and to transfer power from the large Wall Street companies and traders. Many people argue that Robinhood is not “taking money from the rich to the poor”, but doing the exact opposite. Robinhood was forced to raise $1 billion in emergency funding.
