Robinhood CEO and Elon Musk’s Banter Triggers Stampede for Clubhouse App

A surprise chat between Vlad Tenev, the CEO at Robinhood, and Elon Musk, the tech billionaire, about the Clubhouse, a new audio-based social network, has helped in propelling the app to the top of the charts for startups. In fact, it ended up sparking a scramble of invitations to the unique service. The conversation between the two entrepreneurs about the platform came on Sunday amidst significant interest in news about Robinhood. It appears that the online brokerage was caught up in a wild battle in the stock markets between big Wall Street Funds and retail investors.

As far as Clubhouse is concerned, the service, which is less than a year old, allows its members to invite a limited number of people during its pre-launch period. The demand for its invitation got so intense that a full blown market has grown for them on various platforms like Craigslist, eBay and Reddit. In China, the invitations to Clubhouse are being sold on Idle Fish, which is the second-hand market place of Alibaba, even though the app is not available in the country’s Apple App Store. In Japan, the service has been swarmed by media, tech workers and investors. As of Tuesday, the statistics indicated that the Clubhouse app had been installed by 3.6 million people worldwide.

Currently, the app is only available on Apple’s iPhone and about 1.1 million people had joined the app in the last six days alone. As a matter of fact, investors had been so eager for getting a piece of the action that on Monday at one point, they ended up pushing up share prices of Clubhouse Media Group by 117%, which is actually a completely unrelated stock. There was a 30% jump in the shares of Agora Inc., the Chinese tech firm that’s listed on Nasdaq, because of media reports that it may be Clubhouse’s technology partner.

Both Clubhouse and Agora did not comment on the news about being a technology partner. The latest round of financing for the San Francisco-based company had occurred on January 24^th and it had helped raise its value to $1 billion. The funding had been led by a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz. Amidst the buzz, there has also been some backlash aimed at Clubhouse because its closed-door nature of chats has received a lot of criticism, similar to the one between Musk and Tenev.

Tech news outlet The Information’s editor-in-chief, Jessica Lessin tweeted that a founding partner of Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen had blocked a number of reporters from listening in on the talk delivered by Musk. The chat between Tenev and Musk had taken place on ‘The Good Time Show’, which is a regular Clubhouse event. However, according to the CEO of Clubhouse, Paul Davidson said that event hosts can decide who is allowed to listen in, which underscored the concerns about the app’s clubby nature. Separately, Andreessen Horowitz had announced in January that a new ‘media property’ was being launched and would be added to its blogging and podcasting activities.