Vlad Tenev Wants to Tokenize SpaceX, OpenAI on Robinhood

“Right now it's hard to invest in OpenAI or SpaceX as a private company. And I think crypto can help solve that. If you tokenize private companies, it'll be good for the companies and also for investors. It's crazy to me that you can't invest in companies like SpaceX and OpenAI.”

- Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood 

The public markets aren’t what they used to be.

An increasing number of companies are choosing to stay private for longer, rather than go public on the stock market.

Some of the world's biggest companies—the ones that will define our collective future—are not available on the public stock market. OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic… even Stripe, which was founded in 2010, are still private companies.

Yet, despite the fact that these companies are not public, the equity in these companies still trades hands in the private markets. SpaceX, Stripe, and other private companies will frequently conduct ‘tender offers,’ allowing stakeholders to sell shares to pre-arranged investors. It is not unheard of for someone motivated in your sphere to have been able to gain access to SpaceX equity this way—we have an employee at Bankless who somehow got his hands on a little bit of ownership of SpaceX.

Despite being private, the markets for private equity still exist.

The biggest reason that prevents the majority of companies from going public is the $1–3M of upfront expenses and ~$2M of yearly ongoing costs to maintain compliance on the public market. This financial burden is the hurdle that many companies fail to get over.

Bankless Nation, in my recent conversation with Vlad Tenev, he spoke about the idea of a tokenized form of SpaceX, or OpenAI, or many of the other private companies that are working to change how humanity operates. OpenAI is already disrupting every field of work imaginable (check out this twitter thread I found yesterday about how one developer replaced months of architect labor), and SpaceX is already delivering first-world quality internet access to the entire planet.

Simply as a heuristic—if the company is changing the face of humanity, I think it would be a nice thing to own. And if the companies are choosing to not go public, then maybe tokenization can offer the opportunity of ownership to those motivated to seek it.

There’s still a lot left to color in here. Not all CEOs want their company public. Compliance costs are here for a reason. We’ll need some rules and regulations to ensure orderly tokenized equity markets.

But the pieces to create tokenized equity markets all already exist. Maybe once all the institutions are done playing with stablecoins, they can point their focus to something a little more ambitious—like a compliant equity tokenization process.

Then, Vlad can list those tokens on Robinhood, and the average individual can access ownership of the world’s most disruptive companies.