Robinhood buys back $605 million stake once owned by Sam

Robinhood Markets has repurchased $605 million worth of shares that previously belonged to Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto mogul, capping a contentious ownership dispute.
Robinhood, which runs the popular commission-free stock trading app, said in regulatory filing Friday that it bought more than 55 million of its own shares that were seized by the Justice Department in January. After trading platform FTX and the rest of Bankman-Fried’s sprawling crypto empire collapsed last fall, Emergent Fidelity Technologies, a holding company majority-owned by Bankman-Fried, went bankrupt.
Four separate entities competed for the Robinhood stake following FTX’s collapse: FTX, Bankman-Fried himself, the bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi, which argued Emergent had pledged the shares to it as collateral on a loan; and an individual creditor of FTX.
Ultimately, Robinhood repurchased the shares from the United States Marshals Service, which had custody of them.
There was a 3.5% jump in Robinhood shares on Friday.
According to Robinhood’s chief financial officer Jason Warnick, “we are excited to have acquired these shares and look forward to executing on our growth plans for our customers and shareholders.”
In a multibillion-dollar fraud, Bankman-Fried, 31, lied to investors and illegally siphoned funds from FTX customers, according to US prosecutors. Despite all the charges against him, he has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go on trial in October.