So Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev actually dropped some new info last night via Clubhouse which helped me unravel the real story. The reason he sounds dishonest on TV is because he's hiding something in plain sight, and it's NOT what people are crucifying him for. The problem with RH:

The problem with Robinhood is that their risk management is f*cked up. And they came super close to imploding. Somehow they let their customers take risky leveraged positions, and thus were hit suddenly with a $3B capital requirement.

But Robinhood's balance sheet is under $500M, so they needed a $1B temporary bailout from Sequoia & other investors. So the reason why Vlad seems shady is because he's hiding the fact that Robinhood nearly imploded. And everyone would've lost money anyway.

& Robinhood would risk getting investigated by regulators AGAIN. Remember how they were fined $65M by the SEC less than 2 months ago? They had just closed that awful chapter and didn't want to reopen another can of worms. That's why Vlad is stuck between a rock and a hard place

They had to choose between pissing off customers: "Oh we weren't expecting this unprecedented," vs. pissing off regulators: "Oh we were taking too much risk." Someone in their clearing risk dept was totally incompetent. AND someone at the C-level didn't see this situation coming.

Tl;dr- Robinhood got greedy letting their customers overtrade, took a gamble with risk, & were hit with a "discretionary" $3B bill by the NSCC. Between pissing off users via restrictions vs. users + SEC with the news of near implosion, they chose the former (w/ poor execution).

Vlad will be fired by the board and be replaced by a more "experienced" person. Similar to the Uber, WeWork, and SoFi scandals.

Robinhood will eventually do a SPAC instead of an IPO, very similar to what SoFi did after Cagney was ousted.