Robinhood to buy back Bankman-Fried’s stake for $605M from U.S. government | Hacker News Reader

Robinhood to buy back Bankman-Fried’s stake for $605M from U.S. government

cnbc.com

71 pointsmfiguiere35 comments

Are people actually using Robinhood for anything serious?

Personally, if something goes wrong with my money, there needs to be someone on a phone line somewhere to call. I don't understand why anyone would settle for _nonexistant_ customer service.

My auto investment is in vanguard which is the bulk of it and I have Robinhood for random day trading. I’ve never needed to call or needed support from either. I trust vanguard more but Robinhoods mobile app is better than vanguard. Both have their purpose.

It's basically a gambling app as proven by GameStop

I use it to auto buy stocks every month. Although M1 Finance is often better.

RobinHood does have phone based support.

Does anyone know how much Bankman-Fried's company paid for those shares? Does this represent a good deal for Robinhood, or are they paying a premium to get them back?

The SEC filing where SBF disclosed his stake was May 2, 2022. There was a noticeable HOOD volume increase on April 27-28-29 so let's assume that's when they were purchased. The range for that time period was $9.00-10.79/share.

However, that was on the open market so Robin Hood's proceeds were $0.00.

The robin hood IPO was at $38/share which is more than $10.96 a share so in that sense it's a good deal for them.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1783879/000114036122...

Shares were sold at $10.96, a ~2% discount to the current $11.18 share price. Was the US not able to sell these shares on the open market because it would tank the price and value of the shares?

Edit: Facepalm. 2% not 20%

Never mind the incorrect math, you have a timing problem: you looked at the price this morning after reading the news about it, but the deal was effectively done overnight. Yesterday's closing price for the stock was $10.89.

That's 2%

`(11.18-10.96)/11.18=0.0196779964`

That checks out. A 20% discount would've been `11.18-0.2*11.18=8.944`.

Does the US gov make a profit on the deal? Does some or all of the proceeds go to pay back victims?

The govt didn't buy the shares, they seized them. So it's all technically profit but they probably want to reimburse the scammed folks.

As of today, SBF hasn’t been found guilty in any court of law.

Are the government typically allowed to seize and sell your assets and possibly redistribute the proceeds before you’ve even been to court?

What if he needed those funds for his legal defence?

This has nothing to do with his criminal trial, this has to do with his company filing for bankruptcy. If he didn't want the gov't to auction of his companies assets in order to satisfy his creditors... then he shouldn't have declared bankruptcy, as that's exactly what happens in a bankruptcy proceeding.

Is this part of bankruptcy or the criminal trial? It was the US marshals that sold it that sounds more like criminal asset forfeiture. I did not dig too deep but not immediately clear.

> Are the government typically allowed to seize and sell your assets and possibly redistribute the proceeds before you’ve even been to court?

Yes, asset seizure is the norm for law enforcement in America.

> What if he needed those funds for his legal defence?

The money is in a limbo state, as it might be proceeds from crimes. The justice system doesn't want you using proceeds from crimes in any way, shape or form.

> asset seizure is the norm for law enforcement in America

Freeze and seizure, sure. Pre-trial disposal, no. In this case, the headline is being loose in that these aren't Bankman-Fried the natural person's shares, they're a bankrupt entity's. Selling a bankrupt entity's stuff is par for the course.

Is that true when the entity itself is fraudulent? At what point can we separate SBF & Co's fraud from the company itself?

AFAICT he pledged them to BlockFi to try to stop a margin call, and they went bankrupt, so its just a question of which bankruptcy claims they are for.

What do you mean “reimburse the scammed folks”? Any holder of bitcoins would receive a share of their money back?

Whatever the FBI is up to, it’s most certainly not reimbursing the customers.

Not the customers, but FTX lenders investors. There are likely tons of lawsuits filed by them to claim their piece of the govt seized assets. Its up to the govt to decide whether to help customers or investors and lenders.

The article is scant on details, so its unclear what the money would be used for...

But why should the Government get a $605M payday for appropriating privately held assets? That sets up a dark conflict of interest.

It's not a payday for the government. This money will be returned to creditors as part of the bankruptcy process.

I think too many people got used to crypto’s “well if the software says it…” mortal/legal/ethical code.

They assume that traditional finance isn’t a thoughtfully designed system with checks and balances because they were blindly railing against it before.

Haven’t FTX’s bankruptcy lawyers already billed $200m? That’s money that isn’t going to FTX’s creditors.

Sure, people have scammed larger sums, but I wouldn’t conclude the traditional financial system is thoughtfully designed with checks and balances while lawyers are making hundreds of millions processing bankruptcy transactions.

There’s gotta be room for improvement along the moral/legal/ethical dimensions for our current system.

It takes a lot of effort to unravel such a huge mess. It's impossible to do cheap.

The corporate structure has more than 100 legal entities around the globe intentionally designed to obfuscate what's going on. So you need domain experts in each country along with experts on unraveling the structure.

In the end, for this particular company, it doesn't matter. The IRS has filed a claim for $30B+ in unpaid taxes. There's nothing left for creditors.

Some of the publicly available billables are outrageous though. 100 entities is pretty common.

Perhaps, but the posted does not say that...

It also doesn't say that the shares were paid for with wire transaction as opposed to physical cash in stacks of $100 bill, but that also is what happened. They're not going to explain the common bit in every story, only the unique bits. Whenever the gov't sells things in a bankruptcy or fraud proceeding, the money goes to the creditors/victims, and then fines.

> Perhaps, but the posted does not say that...

It doesn't say the government is profiting either. You just made that up.

Well, that piece is pretty easy to conclude. They acquired it for essentially nothing.

You are missing a very obvious piece of the puzzle here: assets seized by the government during bankruptcy get used to offset liabilities of the bankrupt company. This doesn't need to be explicitly said; it wouldn't make sense for it to work any other way.

> Well, that piece is pretty easy to conclude.

It's also an incorrect conclusion.

Because they declared bankruptcy - that's how bankruptcy works. You declare bankruptcy, the gov't puts someone in charge of managing the sale of your assets in order to reimburse your creditors.

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