"We’re Building an Energy Grid in Space" - Robinhood Co-Founder
TL;DR
Beiju Bhatt’s whole arc starts with crisis, not finance — He says the defining switch flipped in 8th grade when his father, a NASA Langley scientist on dialysis for years, nearly died from complications, and Bhatt decided that excelling in school was how he would “get to stay in America.”
Robinhood came from obsessing over an ignored user, not just cutting fees — Bhatt says the core insight was that legacy brokerages were built for near-retirement, upper-middle-class Americans, so Robinhood tested prototypes with Stanford students and removed account minimums and $5-$10 commissions that made young people hesitate before even starting.
He still frames Robinhood as a product-market-fit story with social consequences — His claim is that if you make finance culturally relevant for young people, “it’s the burden of the rest of society to understand why it’s cool,” and he argues Robinhood helped create a real “vibe shift” where younger people now care about their finances.
The GameStop crisis was, in his words, internet meme culture colliding with capitalism and COVID — Looking back five years later, Bhatt says Robinhood got trapped at the center of forces it couldn’t control, needed capital to satisfy clearing requirements, and then faced conspiracy theories so sticky that the company had to accept it would be a “long slog” to rebuild trust.
Aetherflux is his attempt to build ‘an energy company in space,’ starting with military use cases — The near-term plan is to launch two demo missions in 2025, collect solar power in low Earth orbit using an Apex satellite bus, store it in onboard batteries, and beam it down via infrared laser to portable ground receivers for off-grid or contested environments.
His bigger bet is that AI turns space power from sci-fi into urgent infrastructure — Bhatt says the real unlock may be using orbital solar power to run inference workloads in space itself, arguing that Earth-based AI has become a construction-and-grid bottleneck while space turns the problem back into industrial manufacturing.
The Breakdown
The family story that lit the fuse
Bhatt starts way before Robinhood, with immigrant parents from India, a dad obsessed with theoretical physics, and a mother who didn’t even want to move to America. The emotional center is his father’s long kidney failure ordeal: years of dialysis, then a brutal hospitalization when Bhatt was in 8th grade that made him think, as an only child in a poor Virginia family, “what the heck am I going to do?”
The moment school became survival
He says he wasn’t always a machine academically; in fact, bombing the PSAT as a kid from a Gujarati-speaking home shook his confidence. But after his dad’s health crisis, he became “very very very dedicated” to school and discovered a philosophy he still uses: hard things become intuitive if you revisit them enough times, especially in math.
Stanford, physics, and the first big ambitious bet
Bhatt applied only to Caltech, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford — basically an all-killer, no-safety-school list — because he’d started learning that arbitrarily ambitious goalposts can work if you commit. He got into Caltech and Stanford, chose Stanford sight unseen, and followed the thread that had animated him since childhood: grand unification, quantum gravity, and the intoxicating idea that there might be a “theory of everything.”
Why a physics kid ended up in finance anyway
Leaving Stanford with a math master’s right into the 2008 collapse, he wanted academia but felt pressure to get a real job and pay off debt. He got rejected by Apple and Google, realized he had “basically no marketable skills” because he hadn’t learned to code, and then found finance unexpectedly compelling because markets felt like statistical mechanics: lots of tiny interactions, one emergent system.
Robinhood’s real insight: younger people weren’t being spoken to
Bhatt’s version of the origin story is less “free trading app” and more “we actually talked to the people nobody else was building for.” He and the team brought prototypes to Stanford coffee shops, listened to students, and learned that $5,000 minimums and small commissions weren’t minor annoyances — they were psychological blockers that made investing feel off-limits.
The GameStop wound still sounds personal
When Ashley Vance pushes on memestock backlash, Bhatt doesn’t dodge it: he calls it brutal. His summary is vivid and slightly exhausted — Reddit meme culture, lockdown boredom, and capitalism all on a collision course, with Robinhood at the center, needing capital while the internet decided on a conspiracy narrative it wouldn’t let go.
From democratizing finance to building a grid in orbit
Bhatt says he’d wanted to do something space- and energy-related since the early Robinhood years, reading about helium-3 mining and getting hooked on The Case for Mars. Aetherflux is the result: use near-continuous sunlight in dawn-dusk low Earth orbit, convert it to electricity, store it in a battery, and beam it down via infrared lasers to a receiver that acts like a solar panel tuned to that wavelength.
Why AI made the idea feel urgent, not just cool
The company starts with defense applications — getting power into contested or off-grid environments with minimal ground infrastructure — but Bhatt says AI changed the stakes. His newest thesis is that as Earth-based AI becomes a five-to-eight-year construction and grid problem, orbital power and even orbital inference could become a faster manufacturing problem, which is why he sounds all-in: “It is the alpha and the omega of my life.”