I found $20 in my old pants and I’m ready to take over Robinhood - The Verge

There’s speculation that Robinhood is a takeover target. I don’t see why I should wait for someone else to buy it when I’ve got $20 right here.

Robinhood is trading just above $10 a share as of this publication, which is about a 73 percent decrease from its price at IPO, $38. The market cap is now under $10 billion. Friends, it’s possible. The more the shares fall, the easier it is for the memestonkers to snatch. How would a bunch of retail investors seize Robinhood? Why not use a DAO?

There’s been a lot of speculation this year — especially after the first round of layoffs, when Robinhood cut 9 percent of its staff — that the app-based trading service is an attractive takeover target. Yesterday, Robinhood cut further: almost a quarter of its remaining staff, including its showy chief product officer hire they got from Google. It also released its earnings a day early, showing dips in revenue, monthly active users, and assets under custody.

Robinhood’s big sell was democratizing finance, remember? Fuck AMC and GameStop, my internet-addled ape friends. It’s time to seize the means of investing: RobinhoodDAO. I will grant that The Verge’s ethics policy prevents me from owning any crypto, but don’t let that stop you from taking my bad ideas seriously. You wanna prove to the world that DAOs are big and important? Time for a corporate raid.

Well, yes, Robinhood’s hemorrhaging monthly active users — in the second quarter of 2022, they had one-third fewer than a year before. But here’s a fun thing about Robinhood’s young user base: They’re going to get older. Usually old people have more money than young ones. So let’s assume some churn, but if we can get one-third of these kiddos to stick, especially the ones with money already, we could make up for the loss in user numbers in the long term through, uh, compound interest? This makes at least as much financial sense as Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, so I look forward to getting calls from banks for debt financing.

We gotta strike while the iron is hot because I think Sam Bankman-Fried is also interested and he has a lot more money. SBF has been on an acquisition spree lately, and Bloomberg reports he’s kicking Robinhood’s tires. Though my unruly curly hair is more sumptuous than his, I don’t think that’s how shareholders are going to make their decision. Plus SBF — as he is known — already has a 7.6 percent stake.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/3/23290510/robinhood-acquisition-target-takeover-dao-lol

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