Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt on luck, skill and space data centers

Baiju Bhatt, the billionaire co-founder of Robinhood Markets Inc., says creating a viral meme takes skill — not luck — and that the same principle applies to building a business.

"All skill," Bhatt said when asked whether luck or good fortune was behind sparking a viral meme during the latest episode of The WSJ Money Interview. The Robinhood co-founder, who also launched Cowboy Space Corp., weighed in on whether skill or chance drove everything from pivoting a business model to building a company from scratch.

Bhatt, whose net worth ranks among the wealthiest fintech founders, built Robinhood through several strategic pivots — a process he described as requiring deliberate decision-making rather than serendipity. The trading platform, which went public in 2021 under the ticker HOOD, helped democratize stock trading for a generation of retail investors and became a central player in the 2021 meme-stock frenzy. Robinhood shares traded up 5.58% following the interview's release.

His second venture, Cowboy Space Corp., is pursuing an ambition that few startups have attempted: building data centers in orbit. The concept involves placing computing infrastructure in space, where latency advantages and access to solar energy could offer cost benefits over terrestrial data centers. The company has not yet disclosed its funding, capacity targets, or launch timeline.

The interview also touched on the tough moments Bhatt overcame while building Robinhood, including navigating regulatory scrutiny and managing the platform's explosive growth during the pandemic-era retail trading boom. He shared his framework for evaluating new business opportunities — a method he now applies at Cowboy Space Corp.

Space-based data centers remain a nascent concept. Companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. have explored orbital computing through partnerships, but no major hyperscaler has committed to deploying production workloads in space. The technical challenges include radiation hardening, thermal management, and the cost of launching hardware into orbit — factors that have kept the industry firmly grounded.

For investors, the question is whether space data centers can overcome the economics of terrestrial infrastructure. Terrestrial data centers currently operate at power usage effectiveness ratios below 1.2, with hyperscalers spending more than $200 billion combined on CapEx in 2024 alone. Space-based alternatives would need to demonstrate a clear cost advantage to justify the launch expense.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.