Robinhood's 126% post-IPO rally puts its founders within reach of a $1.4 billion stock payout
- Robinhood's post IPO rally of as much as 126% put its founders within reach of a $1.4 billion payout.
- Co-founders Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt stand to receive 13.8 million shares if Robinhood's stock price closes above $101.50 by 2025.
- Shares of Robinhood hit an intra-day high of $85 on Wednesday, just 19% below the award price.
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A wild post-IPO rally in shares of Robinhood this week put its co-founders within reach of a $1.4 billion stock payout, according to the company's S-1 filing.
Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt stand to each receive 13.8 million shares if Robinhood's stock price closes above $101.50 by 2025 for an extended period of time. Shares of Robinhood hit an intra-day high of $85 on Wednesday, just 19% below the price needed for Tenev and Bhatt to unlock their stock award.
The $101.50 price hurdle is based on the average of the daily volume weighted average of Robinhood's stock price for each day over a consecutive 60-day trading period.
Robinhood stumbled in its IPO debut last week, with shares falling as much as 12%, but the stock has since staged an impressive rebound and recovered all of its losses and then some. The online trading app staged a two-day rally of as much as 126% on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The 13.8 million restrictive stock units were granted to both founders in 2013, but the award terms were revised in May to extend the deadline of the award to 2025. Under the original plan, Tenev and Bhatt would have only received 20% of the stock award if at the time of IPO shares were priced between $30.45 and $50.75, according to the filing.
The company priced its IPO at $38 per share, meaning Tenev and Bhatt would have only received 20% of their stock award if the terms weren't revised.
Tenev and Bhatt also stand to receive millions of more Robinhood shares if their stock price eventually trades up to $300 per share by the end of this decade. The co-founders were granted an additional RSU equity award, 22 million shares for Tenev and 13 million shares of Bhatt, if the stock price hit a number of price hurdles, starting at $120 and moving up in increments of $30 until topping out at $300.
All in all, if successful, the equity awards for Tenev and Bhatt could be worth up to $10.8 billion and $8.1 billion, respectively, assuming both co-founders don't sell a single share of their accumulated equity awards after the last tranche is granted at the $300 per share level.
"The 2021 Market-Based RSUs are designed to incentivize the Co-Founders toward further growing our share price over and above the price hurdles applicable to the 2019 Market-Based RSUs," Robinhood said in the filing.
In April, Robinhood reduced the annual salary of Tenev and Bhatt to $34,248, which is the 2019 median wage of US workers. Both were previously paid a base salary of $400,000.
Tenev and Bhatt founded Robinhood in 2013. The company has seen its business explode as millions of Americans began investing in the stock market amid the COVID-19 pandemic and government stimulus checks. Epic rallies in dogecoin and meme-stocks like GameStop and AMC Entertainment have also boosted its business in recent months.