A listener in Europe had a complaint that went to the heart of a long conversation on the Moonshots podcast. Dave Blundin, founder and general partner of Link Ventures, described the question, which came up in the show's listener Q&A: the man said AI had made him four or five times more productive at work, but he was not being paid more. The gains went to his company's bottom line and to its owners. How could he change that?
Blundin answered with a question: was he a stockholder in the company? The listener said no, because he lives in Europe. Blundin's view was that AI efficiency will turn into profit margins, which should lift share prices. His advice was to own equities (company shares) and to "get your Trump account."
That exchange sums up the argument Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev made on an episode of Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, published on September 19, 2026. As AI changes what work is worth, Tenev argues, ordinary people need a direct financial stake in the technology. In his view, that matters for their income and for whether the public supports AI at all.
Why Tenev compares AI labs with Bitcoin
Tenev began with public opinion. He argued that laws and regulation tend to follow public sentiment over time. Right now, he said, AI is "very unpopular," and you can see it in the fights over data centers.
He contrasted AI with Bitcoin, which he called surprisingly popular given its volatility. Some people who bought above $100,000 have lost money, he noted, yet it remains popular. His explanation is that individual investors have benefited from Bitcoin "since the very beginning": it was a product for individuals first, and institutions came later.
The big AI labs went the other way. Google and NVIDIA are public, Tenev said, but they were already very large companies before they became ways to invest in AI. OpenAI and Anthropic, and until recently xAI, have been private, so ordinary investors could not buy shares. The result, in his telling, is that people have no "skin in the game." They have no reason to defend the technology or "fight for the data center in their neighborhood," because to them AI looks like "wealthy insiders getting richer and richer."
Later, host Peter Diamandis, founder of XPRIZE and Singularity University, said people who owned shares in Anthropic and OpenAI would care much more about how those companies do. Tenev added that such owners would be defending them on social media. Right now, he said, the only people doing that are the companies' employees and venture capitalists. Blundin complained that the public has no access to private companies now worth a trillion dollars, so their equity goes to a handful of venture and private-equity funds.
Route one: a public fund that buys private companies
Tenev's main answer for adults is Robinhood Ventures. He described it as a retail, publicly traded venture capital firm. The fund raises money from mostly retail investors through a stock-market listing (an IPO) and uses that money to invest in private companies. Buyers get shares in the fund, not in the companies directly.
According to Robinhood, Robinhood Ventures Fund I trades on the NYSE, has no accredited-investor requirement and charges no performance-based fees. Tenev described this as "no carry," meaning the manager takes no share of the profits. The fund is a closed-end fund: investors buy and sell fund shares on an exchange but cannot redeem them with the fund itself, and the fund can hold investments that are hard to sell. Tenev said Fund I holds about a dozen late-stage "frontier" companies, and that it had announced an OpenAI investment a couple of months before the recording.
Its newest holding is Crusoe, a company that sources energy, builds data centers for AI and sells cloud computing. Robinhood announced on September 17 that Fund I had bought about $25 million of Crusoe preferred stock, part of a $3.9 billion Series F round that valued Crusoe at $30.9 billion. The deal itself had closed on August 31, more than two weeks before it was made public. On the podcast, Tenev said the investment had been announced "yesterday."
Fund II goes after much younger companies. Robinhood introduced it on August 3 as a business development company, a type of closed-end fund. It focuses on seed-stage investments, especially in companies or founders linked to Y Combinator, and started with 80 private companies. The announcement proposed an NYSE listing on August 13, and the fund's product page now says its shares are trading. On the show, Tenev called an early-stage public vehicle like this unprecedented to his knowledge. He said the goal is to reach companies "before they become household names" and that more funds will follow.
The objection: whose price is it?
Alexander Wissner-Gross, a computer scientist and founder of Reified, asked a narrower question: do these funds offer "liquid price discovery"? Price discovery is how open trading settles on a market price. Tenev said the funds trade on an exchange. Wissner-Gross asked whether that pricing happens at the level of the whole fund or of each company in it. "As an overall fund," Tenev replied.
For Wissner-Gross, that is "the fly in the ointment." He wants something like a total-market index fund covering every venture-backed U.S. tech company, with each company priced separately by active trading. Without that, he warned, the values assigned to the companies inside a fund "could be totally bogus." They could be off by a factor of ten because of inflated funding rounds or an overheated market.
"Well, we're working on it," Tenev answered. He called round-the-clock trading of individual private companies "the North star" and expects it to arrive outside the U.S. first. Earlier in the exchange he had described another route, tokenization, meaning digital tokens that represent shares. He said Robinhood tested it by tokenizing SpaceX and OpenAI and giving the tokens to customers in the EU, a move he acknowledged was controversial. Since then, he said, companies have approached Robinhood to learn how it could give their shares a global market.
Route two: ownership from birth
For children, the vehicle is Trump Accounts. Diamandis summarized the program: American children born from January 2025 through the end of 2028 receive $1,000 from the Treasury, invested in a low-cost index fund, and families and employers can add $5,000 a year. He said the accounts went live on July 4 and that the Treasury reported 7 million accounts opened by late July.
Robinhood's role is largely operational. The company announced in April that it would be the brokerage and initial trustee, alongside BNY, which the Treasury picked as financial agent. Robinhood's responsibilities include the app, the website, educational materials and customer support. Tenev called Robinhood the "implementation layer."
Tenev framed the program as ownership starting at "age zero": everyone born in the country gets "skin in the game" in the growth of American business. He said the app's first screen shows a curve with the account's value today and what it could be at 18 and at 60, and a slider lets families see the effect of adding $50 or $100 a month. By his account, even the $1,000 seed alone grows into the tens of thousands of dollars. With $50 a month, he said, a child could "potentially" have hundreds of thousands of dollars by 28 and perhaps a million by retirement. Those figures are projections that depend on future market returns.
The IRS instructions set out the rules. A Trump Account is a special traditional IRA, an individual retirement account owned by the child. Opening an account and claiming the $1,000 pilot payment are separate choices, and the payment is limited to U.S. citizens with a valid Social Security number born in 2025 through 2028. The $5,000 yearly limit covers ordinary contributions, including employer contributions, but not the pilot payment or certain qualified general contributions. The money goes into funds that generally track an index of mostly U.S. companies, not private AI labs. After the year the child turns 17, most traditional-IRA rules apply. That can mean income tax and a 10% penalty on early withdrawals unless an exception applies, so the money is not simply tax-free cash at 18.
Donors, and doubts about saving
Tenev said he compares the program to the 401(k) because it is an ecosystem as well as an app. He said employers have pledged to fund their employees' children's accounts. Diamandis described Michael Dell's $6.25 billion pledge of $250 per child for children born from 2016 to 2024; Tenev said it goes to children up to age ten in traditionally low-income zip codes. Tenev cited other donors too: Gwynne Shotwell committed a donation of SpaceX shares, and Brad Gerstner took on the state of Indiana. He expects donors to sponsor local schools and zip codes, and said Robinhood is thinking about ways to make giving more fun. He argued the accounts could become the country's default way of giving and, possibly within a decade, the biggest part of long-term saving in the United States.
Blundin saw donated stock as an alternative for people who do not want to fund universal basic income, and as a way to inspire a generation to feel like owners. The European listener he advised, however, falls outside the program: Trump Accounts are for American children, and they hold stock index funds, not shares in private labs.
Wissner-Gross challenged the long-term projections themselves. "We're in the middle of a singularity," he said, referring to the idea of runaway, AI-driven change. Asking what $1,000 will be worth 86 years from now, he suggested, assumes a singularity in which things carry on as "business as usual." Diamandis recalled that Elon Musk had told the show people should not bother saving money. The conversation left the question open: will long-term index investing still matter if AI changes the economy as much as the panel expects?