Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is staying in a hotel due to the reaction following the GameStop commercial rally in late January, Bloomberg reported.
Robinhood restricted trading of GameStop shares from January 28, after an unexpected 2,000% increase in the month to date in the share price, driven by retail investors. Robinhood users, including members of the Reddit r / WallStreetBets forum that applauded the GameStop rally, accused the company of unfairly manipulating the free market.
Some reactions after the frenzy became violent. Tenev has avoided going home in the past few days after receiving death threats, a source told Bloomberg.
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Menlo Park police told Tyler Sonnemaker of the Insider that a handful of protesters threw dog feces at Robinhood’s headquarters and sawed a statue on the property. Institutional investors who bet against GameStop said they had received personal threats, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Robinhood initially said in a statement that he was blocking GameStop stock purchases to “help customers stay informed” amid market volatility, but later clarified that the decision was due to clearinghouse filing requirements registered with the Commission of Securities.
“To be clear, this decision was not made based on the direction of any market maker we target or other market participants,” said Tenev on Twitter.
Business leaders and high-level lawmakers questioned Robinhood’s decision to restrict trade. Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Robinhood’s decision “unacceptable” and Mark Cuban asked on Twitter if the app ended the deal “because they are losing their a ** in these negotiations”.
Tenev is due to testify during a Congressional hearing on Thursday about his company’s decision to suspend GameStop negotiations. The executive recently said on the All-In Podcast that his company could have communicated why it was restricting negotiations “a little better”.
“As soon as these emails were sent, conspiracy theories immediately started to arrive. So, my phone was exploding with, ‘How could you do this? How could you be on the side of the hedge funds?'” Tenev said on podcast. “Of course, we are not on the side of hedge funds. We are building products for our customers. And we just had to do what we did to meet our deposit requirements.”
Robinhood did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.