Vlad Tenev

I was just online all the time, probably working

20 hours a day.

My laptop was usually next to my bed and I was kind of going a little loony.

So I was trying this thing where I slept with my phone in another room because I just thought that this is bad for my mental health.

I need some kind of reset.

And my folks on the East Coast who were doing like the morning open preparations were trying to get a hold of me.

and eventually they call my wife my wife does sleep with her phone next to her so they find out how to get to her she wakes me up and she is obviously perturbed by this whole situation to begin with because nobody ever calls her like hasn't hit the fan to that degree yeah she's like oh my god oh my god vlad there's something going on i can't really understand it but they need you they need you so i go

i pick up my phone my phone is unusable it's like i don't know if you've ever seen these clips of kim kardashian getting like uh having her notifications on and posting an instagram post and then you see all the notifications just churning from the millions of followers it was kind of like that right the phone was unusable from text messages and calls and i would have these messages like

What the fuck are you doing?

How could you side with them?

Wow.

Yeah, it was just people were upset.

They thought that we were siding with the hedge funds and we were colluding with them in some way.

Who decided to shut it down for that 12 hours?

It was the president of the brokerage of the clearing firm.

And part of this is just we have a bunch of businesses and they have presidents and, of course—

You know, the presidents are responsible for all the regulatory matters and running the business.

So this one, the president, you know, made the call.

And it was a tough call for a variety of reasons, right?

Because you can kind of think of the counterfactuals, what would have happened.