Robinhood CEO says companies can’t control how their stock gets tokenized

Vlad Tenev has a simple answer for the CEOs who want him to stop tokenizing their companies’ shares: once a stock trades publicly, you’ve lost the ability to control what financial products reference it. The Robinhood CEO made that argument during a CNBC interview on September 9, 2026, drawing a clean line between what issuers own and what they can actually police. The comments come as a very public feud with AMC Entertainment’s chief executive has put the entire concept of tokenized equities under an uncomfortable spotlight. The argument Tenev is making Tenev’s position rests on a distinction that sounds technical but is actually fairly intuitive. A company controls the rights and obligations baked into its own shares, including dividends, voting power, and corporate governance mechanics. What it cannot control is a separate financial entity building a product that tracks those shares from the outside. Robinhood’s tokenized stocks are structured as debt securities and issued through a separate entity, not by the underlying companies themselves. They are designed to track the price and dividends of U.S.-listed shares on a 1:1 basis, giving non-U.S. investors economic exposure to Am...