Robinhood

SpaceX

Robinhood

Robinhood makes money in ways that don't involve charging users directly. The biggest revenue source is payment for order flow (PFOF) — when users place a trade, Robinhood routes it to market makers like Citadel Securities, who pay Robinhood for the right to execute the trade.

This generates hundreds of millions annually. Robinhood also earns interest on uninvested cash sitting in user accounts, margin lending (charging interest when users borrow money to trade), and Robinhood Gold — a $5/month subscription for larger instant deposits, professional research, and higher interest on cash.

SpaceX

SpaceX makes money three ways. First, launch services — companies and governments pay SpaceX to put their satellites into orbit.

A Falcon 9 launch costs about $67 million, which undercut the competition by 75% when it debuted. Second, Starlink — SpaceX's own satellite internet constellation, which is now generating over $6 billion in annual revenue from 4+ million subscribers.

Third, government contracts — NASA pays SpaceX to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and the DoD pays for national security launches.

The secret sauce is reusability. Before SpaceX, every rocket was used once and thrown into the ocean.

SpaceX figured out how to land the first stage booster back on Earth and fly it again. A single Falcon 9 booster has flown over 20 times.

That's like the difference between throwing away an airplane after every flight versus keeping it for decades.

Robinhood

Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt met as physics and math students at Stanford. After graduating, they moved to New York and started two fintech companies that sold trading software to hedge funds.

While building tools for Wall Street, they noticed something absurd: it cost brokerages essentially nothing to execute a trade electronically, but they were charging retail investors $7-10 per trade.

The math was simple. Electronic trading had driven costs to near zero, but brokerages kept the old pricing because customers didn't know better.

Tenev and Bhatt thought: what if we just charged zero? In 2013, they founded Robinhood with the explicit mission of democratizing finance — giving everyone access to the stock market with no commissions, no minimums, and a beautiful mobile app.

The app launched in 2014 with a waitlist that hit 1 million people before the product was even available. The pink-and-green design, the confetti animation when you made a trade, and the simplicity of the interface made investing feel approachable.

For millions of young Americans who had never bought a stock, Robinhood was the entry point.

SpaceX

In 2001, Elon Musk had just sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion and was sitting on roughly $180 million after taxes. Most people would buy an island.

Musk decided to buy rockets. His original idea was even weirder — he wanted to send a small greenhouse to Mars called "Mars Oasis" to reignite public interest in space exploration.

He flew to Russia three times to buy refurbished ICBMs. The Russians kept raising the price and at one point literally spat on him.

On the flight home from that last failed Russia trip, Musk opened a spreadsheet and started calculating the raw material costs of building a rocket from scratch. He realized the materials were only about 3% of the typical price of a rocket.

The rest was markup, inefficiency, and monopoly pricing by companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. He decided to build his own.

SpaceX was founded in June 2002 in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. Musk put in $100 million of his own money.

He hired Tom Mueller, a legendary rocket propulsion engineer who had been building rocket engines in his garage as a hobby. The first rocket, Falcon 1, was supposed to be the cheapest orbital rocket ever built.

It took six years and three spectacular explosions before it finally worked.

Robinhood

Robinhood grew by making investing feel like a game. The app was designed to be addictive — swipe to trade, confetti for your first purchase, notifications about stock movements.

It was investing designed for the smartphone generation. Critics called it "gamification of finance." Users called it the first trading app that didn't feel like it was designed in 1997.

The referral program was massive. Both the referer and the new user got a free stock when someone signed up.

People were getting free shares of Apple or Ford just for downloading the app. It spread through college campuses like wildfire.

By 2020, the average Robinhood user was 31 years old — decades younger than the average brokerage customer.

Zero commissions forced the entire industry to follow. In October 2019, Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, E-Trade, and Fidelity all dropped their trading commissions to zero within days of each other.

Robinhood had single-handedly destroyed the commission-based brokerage model that had existed for decades.

SpaceX

SpaceX's growth strategy was simple: be cheaper than everyone, then be better than everyone, then be the only option.

They started by undercutting the launch market. The United Launch Alliance (Boeing + Lockheed Martin joint venture) was charging $300-400 million per launch.

SpaceX offered $67 million. Government agencies and commercial satellite companies started lining up.

Reusability was the real game-changer. Landing a rocket booster looked like science fiction when SpaceX first attempted it in 2013.

They failed over and over — spectacular ocean landings, explosions on drone ships, near-misses. But in December 2015, a Falcon 9 first stage landed back at Cape Canaveral.

It was the first time an orbital-class rocket had ever landed after a mission. Now they do it routinely — it's almost boring.

Starlink created a completely new revenue stream. Instead of just launching other people's satellites, SpaceX launched thousands of its own.

By 2024, Starlink had over 4 million subscribers and was generating billions in revenue. It turned SpaceX from a launch company into a telecom company.

Robinhood

GameStop was the worst week in Robinhood's history. In January 2021, Reddit's r/WallStreetBets community drove GameStop stock from $20 to $483.

Millions of Robinhood users were buying. Then on January 28, Robinhood restricted buying of GameStop and several other meme stocks.

Users could only sell, not buy. The stock crashed.

The backlash was nuclear. Users accused Robinhood of siding with hedge funds against retail investors.

Vlad Tenev was dragged before Congress. The real reason was less sinister but equally damaging — Robinhood's clearinghouse (DTCC) demanded $3 billion in additional collateral due to the extreme volatility, and Robinhood didn't have it.

They had to raise $3.4 billion in emergency funding over a weekend. The company that built its brand on democratizing finance had restricted the most democratic stock trade in history.

The payment for order flow controversy never goes away. Critics argue that PFOF creates a conflict of interest — Robinhood profits by routing user trades to market makers rather than getting users the best possible price.

The SEC has considered banning PFOF entirely. If that happens, Robinhood loses its largest revenue source.

Post-IPO performance was brutal. Robinhood went public in July 2021 at $38 per share.

The stock briefly hit $70 on meme stock momentum, then cratered to under $8 by mid-2022 — a 90% decline. The company laid off 23% of staff in April 2022 and another 23% in August 2022.

SpaceX

The early days nearly killed the company. SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 launches all failed.

The first one in 2006 crashed 25 seconds after liftoff due to a corroded fuel line nut. The second in 2007 reached space but the second stage shut down early.

The third in 2008 failed because the first and second stages collided during separation. Musk had enough money for one more attempt.

If flight four failed, SpaceX was dead.

Flight four worked. On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to reach orbit.

Musk has said he was so stressed during that period he was throwing up regularly.

The financial pressure was existential. Musk was simultaneously funding Tesla, which was also on the brink of bankruptcy in 2008.

He had to split his last $40 million between the two companies. He borrowed money for rent.

But right at the end of 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. That contract saved the company.

Starship development has been its own saga. The rocket has exploded multiple times during testing.

Each failure costs hundreds of millions. But SpaceX treats failures as data — they move faster by blowing things up and iterating than competitors do by being cautious.

Robinhood

Robinhood is a stock, options, and crypto trading app. The core product lets you buy and sell stocks, ETFs, and options with zero commissions.

Robinhood Crypto adds trading for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Robinhood Gold is the premium tier — higher interest on cash, larger instant deposits, and Morningstar research reports.

Robinhood Cash Card is a debit card that earns cashback and rounds up purchases to invest spare change. Robinhood Retirement offers IRA accounts with a 1% match on contributions.

Robinhood Legend is their new desktop trading platform aimed at active traders.

SpaceX

Falcon 9 is the workhorse — the most-launched rocket in the world. It carries satellites to orbit and astronauts to the ISS, and the first stage lands itself for reuse.

Falcon Heavy is three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together — the most powerful operational rocket in the world until Starship came along. Dragon is the spacecraft that carries astronauts and cargo to the ISS.

It's the only American vehicle currently flying humans to space. Starlink is the satellite internet service — over 6,000 satellites in orbit delivering broadband to 100+ countries.

Starship is the big one — the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, designed to carry 100+ people to Mars. It's still in testing but has already completed a full flight.

Robinhood

Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, NEA, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, D1 Capital

SpaceX

Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Google, Fidelity Investments, Valor Equity Partners, Baillie Gifford, a]6z (Andreessen Horowitz), NASA (as customer/partner)