CNBC Television Sep 18, 2026
With Vlad Tenev, Co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Robinhood Markets · Roland Busch, President and CEO of Siemens
Seven million Trump accounts were signed up before the program launched, Vlad Tenev said, and Robinhood is the sole broker and initial trustee for them.
Most brokerages compete for the customer who already has savings. Tenev's argument is that the account should be opened at birth, and that the only product Robinhood pays people to use is the retirement account.
"No better way to make that a reality than to start at birth from age zero."
Tenev co-founded Robinhood and is its chairman and chief executive. He said the firm runs the Trump accounts alongside BNY as financial agent and the Treasury, and that Michael Dell's foundation money has started reaching children. The episode also carries a long interview with Roland Busch, who runs Siemens, the largest industrial company in Europe.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 12 moments that matter.
Key Takeaways
7 million signed up for Trump accounts before launch, and Robinhood is the sole broker and initial trustee
The only product Robinhood pays customers to use is retirement, at a 3% contribution match for gold members
Prediction markets are read as a crypto and macro business, not a sports one — sports goes to a minority within a few years
Over $100T is passing from older generations to younger, which is the demand Robinhood is building trusts and estate planning for
Siemens' constraint on industrial AI is hallucination on a shop floor, which it says an automated plant cannot tolerate
A quarter of Siemens' revenue now comes from the United States, and every division is present there
The technical case against copper is that commercial hedgers hold their largest net short in years while small speculators pile in
Hyperscalers are swapping copper for fiber optic cable, which is faster and cheaper
General Mills' 6.72% dividend yield was called a red flag rather than an opportunity
Micron at 13 times earnings is a hold, not a sale, even after the stock crossed $1,000
1. The iPhone Duo Launch
The host went to the Apple store in the basement of the old GM building in midtown Manhattan for the new phone launch, and came away more interested in the device that is not out yet.
He said the iPhone 18 gets something like 36 hours per charge, which he cared about more than the camera, and that he bought it for the battery life. The photographs he called professional grade, while admitting the word aperture means nothing to him.
The bigger event, on his account, is a month away. Apple is running a double launch: the iPhone 18 now and the Duo, a large foldable, in October. He said he played with the Duo the day before and found no crease at all, which matters because a visible seam would make the device read as two pieces rather than one. The screen turns pages like a hardback, which he thought answers the complaint people have about e-readers.
He told Apple's chief executive, John Ternus, and its finance chief that he intends to buy the Duo as a second phone, and neither man seemed surprised. The plan is to pre-order on 16 October rather than wait for the 23 October availability date, because reviews for the Duo are said to be among the best in Apple's history. Not since the original iPhone reveal, he said, has an Apple launch interested him this much.
On price, he took the other side of the analyst complaint that the new phones cost too much because memory prices are rising. Almost nobody pays the list price, he said: the carriers subsidize handsets heavily, and his own 17 Pro Max might fetch about $800 on trade-in, with a better deal again if he switches carrier.
2. Next Week's Game Plan
The week ahead looked thin to him, and he singled out one analyst meeting as the thing to watch.
Okta holds its analyst day on Wednesday. The host said its chief executive, Todd McKinnon, was the most enlightening person he met in Silicon Valley that week, because identity verification extends to AI agents: agents have identities, and once you know the identity you know where the agent is and can stop it, whether it arrives alone or as a swarm. His own reaction was that the AI companies raising alarms about rogue agents appear not to have asked the cybersecurity industry whether the problem is already solved.
The earnings he flagged, and what he said about each:
KB Home, Tuesday. He expects another poor number, on the grounds that a homebuilder cannot sell houses into a Federal Reserve that is raising rates, and that it will echo what Lennar reported this week
Cintas and Paychex, both serving small and medium businesses, arrive with momentum; that part of the economy is the hottest and has historically not been hurt by a first rate hike
General Mills now yields 6.72%, a level he said he never expected to see on a company that consistent. Input costs and pressure on processed food are what pushed the yield that high, and he treated it as a red flag rather than a bargain
Darden, Thursday, owns Olive Garden, which he called a gold mine, but he prefers Brinker for a smaller and stronger plan, and recommended its $11 special
Costco, Thursday after the bell, is acting poorly and struggling to get younger customers to renew memberships, because younger shoppers buy online, have less storage space, and miss the in-store experience that separates the chain from its rivals
He closed the segment on the market itself: September has been acceptable rather than good, and the tape is finally oversold, at minus 5.6 on his oscillator, which he reads as due for a bounce.
3. A Caller Holding Micron
A first-time caller said he bought Micron in 2014 and has not touched it since, that the position is up sharply on the AI boom, that the stock crossed $1,000 that day and remains 25% below its all-time high, and that he does not need the money and does not want the tax bill. Micron reports at the end of the month.
The host told him not to sell. His reason was the multiple: the stock trades at 13 times earnings and perhaps six times next year's, which he called incredibly cheap, and he disclosed a large position in his charitable trust.
4. Robinhood's One Idea
Asked how much of the product roadmap is customer demand and how much is Robinhood's own view, Tenev said both.
The roadmap is half requests and half conviction
I think that it's a good mix of both.
Vlad Tenev
Customers ask for more tradable assets and international stocks, he said, and that list never ends. Tokenization and prediction markets were the other kind: nobody asked, and Robinhood built what it thought the products should be. He said one idea sits underneath the credit cards, the Trump accounts, the tokenization and the equities, and that idea is ownership — people with assets have a financial stake, and a society where more people own financial assets is a more stable one.
Pressed on whether the platform encourages gambling, Tenev did not dispute that traders are the core of the business.
Traders are the engine room, not the problem
The thing is ownership doesn't work without healthy markets and markets don't work without traders.
Vlad Tenev
Trading products are how Robinhood acquires customers, he said, and those customers then move into products he described as less exciting and more important long-term. He rejected the idea that there are two separate populations, traders and savers, and said both impulses sit inside the same person. The host's own version of that is a rule he repeats on air, that a tenth of a portfolio can go to speculation.
Only one product at Robinhood is paid for out of the company's own balance sheet.
The one incentive is retirement
We incentivize retirement.
Vlad Tenev
A gold member opening a retirement account gets a 3% contribution match, so $100 contributed becomes $103, paid from corporate funds. The reasoning he gave is that lifelong employment has gone, accounts are portable, and reliance on the conventional 401(k) has fallen. Retirement advertising is bad at attracting people, he said, so customers arrive through prediction markets, stock trading and crypto and then adopt the rest at high rates.
5. The Wealth Handoff
The demand Tenev described is generational, and he took the figure from the host's own question.
The size of the transfer
I mean you mentioned it yourself over a hundred trillion in wealth is passing from older generations to younger and when we look at what that means that's an accelerating and very large asset transfer over the next several decades
Vlad Tenev
Those customers start simple, he said: somewhere to buy stocks, maybe an IRA. Their needs then get complicated. They ask for trusts, which Robinhood now offers in several forms, then estate planning, then private wealth management and private banking. His stated challenge is selling products built for the wealthy to the mass market at low prices, and he thinks technology is what makes that possible.
What the old distribution model looked like
It used to be that you had to go into a building with big columns and talk to expensive people wearing suits in order to get some of these services.
Vlad Tenev
Firms would not talk to a client with less than about $250,000, he said, and technology widens the front door to tens of millions of people.
6. Prediction Markets
On prediction markets, Tenev tied the product back to ownership: a view can be sold directly rather than expressed through a proxy. Someone with an opinion on crypto market-structure legislation can trade that opinion; someone with a view on Federal Reserve rates can trade the rate instead of futures.
He expects the range of contracts to widen sharply, and he pushed back on the assumption that this is a sports business.
Sports is the wedge, not the market
But we're already seeing other categories like crypto taking a disproportionate share. And I think within a few years, sports will actually be in the minority.
Vlad Tenev
Sports brought people in, created liquidity and established the category, which he compared to the role active trading plays in the rest of the business. The host's position was that people are going to trade predictions somewhere, and he would rather that happened at a firm customers have heard of.
7. The Trump Accounts
Asked how the Trump accounts are doing, Tenev said Robinhood is the sole broker and initial trustee, working with BNY as financial agent and with the Treasury and the administration.
Ownership from birth
No better way to make that a reality than to start at birth from age zero.
Vlad Tenev
What the accounts do
You teach the kids about compound interest. You create a connection with the great companies of this country and we do it at very very low cost.
Vlad Tenev
The sign-up number
So the program's been extraordinarily effective. 7 million signed up pre-launch
Vlad Tenev
Michael Dell kickstarted the program with a donation from his foundation, Tenev said, and that money began reaching children in the week before the interview. An employer program is being built so companies can manage contributions for staff, and he named Gwynne Shotwell and Brad Gerstner among the other donors. He called it a candidate for the best philanthropic platform available.
8. Copper Looks Toppy
Copper has been trading near its highs, which is normally read as economic strength because construction and data centers consume so much of it. The host's segment argued the price has gone high enough to defeat itself.
The chart work came from Larry Williams, whose record the host summarized: he called the April 2020 bottom when the consensus was that the economy was collapsing, and five months ago told viewers to avoid gold before it fell in May and June. His reading now is that copper is in a vulnerable phase of extreme overvaluation.
Three things support it, on the host's account of the charts:
A valuation model measuring copper against the dollar index has moved above its overvalued line, which has preceded a selloff repeatedly over the last couple of years
The CFTC's commitments of traders data shows small speculators — the least informed group — buying heavily and driving open interest up, while commercial hedgers, the producers and consumers who deal in the metal every day, hold their largest net short position in years. The question he put is who is left to buy
A dominant cycle that repeats roughly every 300 days fits the 2024 and 2025 action, and has copper at a high point about to turn negative
Two fundamental changes sit underneath the charts. Hyperscalers have started replacing copper with fiber optic cable, which is both faster and cheaper, and a Federal Reserve that is raising rates eventually pushes commodity prices down. The host noted that another chartist was bullish on copper at the end of August, before the Fed got serious about inflation and before OpenAI and Anthropic began talking about slowing the pace of AI development.
He said Williams wants one more short-term rally to sell into, and that he would sell Freeport-McMoRan on Monday if he owned it.
9. Siemens' Industrial AI
Busch was interviewed at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference. Siemens is the largest industrial company in Europe, and the host's framing was that it may also be the furthest along in using AI.
The strategy in one sentence
We combine the real and the digital worlds.
Roland Busch
AI is accelerating that strategy, Busch said, and the hard part is what happens when a probabilistic technology meets a physical process that has to be exact.
The constraint on a factory floor
I mean we cannot allow hallucination on a shop floor when you automate a plant.
Roland Busch
Siemens' claim to the problem is that it knows the physical side, automating factories and building trains, and also builds digital twins, so it can connect the two.
The host drew the contrast with how most companies are using AI, which is call centers, against Siemens using it for engineering answers. Busch said the change runs through design, manufacturing and operation. It starts with data held in Siemens' product lifecycle management software, which he said most models have never seen and cannot read, because it is design and engineering data. That data also records what was changed, so a model can learn why a change was made, and it carries serviceability and manufacturing instructions. With engineering software and AI on top, older designs become the training material for new ones.
What that buys the customer
It shortens your cycle time and eventually gives you better outcome faster.
Roland Busch
Asked whether the savings come out of workers, Busch said the jobs change rather than disappear.
His answer on employment
I'm not so much concerned about losing jobs. For me, the point is that jobs do change, right?
Roland Busch
A growing company can create jobs, he said, and training people on the technology is what moves them into the new ones. Even in the autonomous manufacturing sites Siemens is working toward, people stay on the floor: the work is contextualization and keeping a human in the loop, and hundreds of robots still need orchestrating. He said Siemens invests heavily in training and education, and that this is what raises productivity faster.
10. Siemens in America
Busch gave the geographic split as 53% of the business in Europe and 24% in America, and said growing the American share is both the goal and unavoidable.
He called the American market the fastest growing one, and said it is not only about data centers: the take rate on software, IT and AI technologies is higher too. Asked which divisions are present in the United States, he did not qualify the answer.
Every division, not just one
They're all in the United States.
Roland Busch
One of Siemens' largest train manufacturing sites is in Sacramento, and it has added another on the east coast.
The Amtrak contract
Amtrak is renewing their fleet with our trains.
Roland Busch
The electrification business is expanding too.
The latest plant investment
We just invested another 200 million expanding our electrification site for medium voltage low voltage
Roland Busch
Siemens has spent about $30 billion over roughly the last twenty years, Busch said, most of it on acquisitions and most of that in the United States, and its software business is headquartered there. The host used the interview to make a pitch: Siemens trades in America only as ADRs with little volume, and he thinks Europe's largest industrial company should list on the New York Stock Exchange. Busch conceded the point about relative market performance and left it there.
11. The Lightning Round
Two callers, two rate-driven answers.
The first, who runs a real estate company, asked about Rocket Mortgage: the housing sector faces headwinds but the platform is strong and taking share. The host said no. The stock already prices one rate hike, he said, and it does not price the multiple hikes he expects, which is the worst possible setup for a mortgage lender.
The second asked about a small semiconductor materials company he bought after it partnered with Nvidia. The host called it a good speculation rather than a great one, because the company is not making money and he does not recommend unprofitable companies in a rising-rate cycle.
12. The AI Safety Answers
The host closed by replaying what he found in San Francisco that week, where AI safety was the subject everywhere he went. The question he put to technology leaders was whether everyone dies by 2030 in a hostile artificial intelligence attack.
Nobody he asked said yes. The answers he collected ran along a few lines: that thousands of companies are building AI rather than two, and guardrails and safety technology are being invented alongside the capability; that safety deserves to be taken seriously and pacing the frontier is acceptable if researchers ask for it, but the response should be moderate and pragmatic rather than fearful; that the cybersecurity tools to stop agents going rogue already exist, and that anyone who can genuinely put a 10% probability on extinction in 2030 should be trading on it instead; that agents only do what they were trained to do, and the answer is visibility, control and identity; and that a product company owes customers quality, reliability and safety as basic engineering hygiene, which is not solved by the whole industry tapping the brakes together.
The one point of near-agreement was that a collective slowdown is not how this gets fixed. Safety and testing are engineering problems, on that account: build the product, test it properly, and hold it back until it is ready.
Bonus Insights
The host's account of his own week included an Apple executive he talks to at every launch, Greg Joswiak, who he said has never been more excited about a product than the Duo.
He also gave the reason he wants a second phone rather than an upgrade. He does not want to be off a call when he is working or traveling, and he expects satellite internet on aircraft to turn a folding screen into a usable television, which he framed as the end of missing Super Bowls and game sevens to bad wifi.
On Apple's communication style, he approved of Ternus continuing the practice of letting the products speak for themselves, and he said Siemens automates a large share of the world's production lines while its competitors are a fraction of its size.
The bottom line across the episode is that a rising-rate cycle decides most of the calls in it: sell copper into the next rally, avoid the mortgage lender and the homebuilder, hold the cheap semiconductor, and treat the two industrial and brokerage stories as businesses being rebuilt around AI and ownership rather than around the rate.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Robinhood Markets (Tenev's firm: sole broker and initial trustee of the Trump accounts, a 3% retirement match, prediction markets, tokenization and credit cards, all built on what he calls ownership)
Apple (The iPhone 18 at about 36 hours a charge, and the Duo foldable the host says is revolutionary and intends to buy as a second phone)
Siemens (Busch's company: industrial AI on engineering data, digital twins, trains built in Sacramento and on the east coast, and a quarter of revenue from the United States)
Okta (Its analyst day is the host's pick of the week; McKinnon's argument is that agents have identities, so they can be located and stopped)
Micron Technology (A caller's 2014 position, above $1,000 and 25% off its high; the host said hold it at 13 times earnings)
Freeport-McMoRan (The copper name the host said he would sell on Monday after seeing Williams's charts)
General Mills (A 6.72% dividend yield he treated as a red flag, caused by input costs and pressure on processed food)
Costco (Acting poorly, with younger shoppers not renewing memberships because they buy online and have less space)
Darden Restaurants and Brinker International (Olive Garden is a gold mine, but he prefers Brinker's smaller and stronger plan and its $11 special)
KB Home and Lennar (Homebuilders he expects to keep reporting poor numbers while the Fed raises rates)
Cintas and Paychex (Both report with momentum, because small and medium business is the hottest part of the economy and survives a first hike)
Rocket Mortgage (A caller's question the host declined, because the stock prices one hike and he expects several)
T-Mobile (Named as where the handset subsidy makes the new phone cheapest for him)
Starlink (Satellite internet on aircraft is what he thinks makes a folding screen worth carrying)
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