🌎 Infinite solar
Robinhood co-founder aims to prove NASA wrong with a power grid in space.
Hey Freethinkers,
What would you do with a billion dollars? Buy a private jet and travel? Buy an island and settle down?
Entrepreneur Baiju Bhatt was just 33 years old when the stock-trading platform he co-founded, Robinhood, made him a billionaire (on paper, anyways). He then kept working at the startup for another six years, growing it into a publicly traded company worth $20 billion, before stepping down as chief creative officer in 2024, finally ready to enjoy the fruits of his labor.
Just kidding. Instead of retiring on a warm beach somewhere, Bhatt did one of the most stressful things a person can do: he founded an aerospace startup. This week, Freethink digs into Bhatt’s new company, Aetherflux, and its mission to beam solar power from space to Earth — something that could make clean energy available to anyone on the planet at any time.
Also on deck: Freethink Voice Peter Leyden explores the abundance movement and the major opportunity it’s currently missing.
Read on,
Kristin
FREETHINK FEATURES
The billionaire building space lasers to power Earth
Entrepreneur Baiju Bhatt earned his way into the three-comma club off the back of Robinhood, the stock-trading platform he co-founded in 2013. With his new company, Aetherflux, the billionaire is determined to disrupt something even bigger than Wall Street: space. The startup’s goal is to use lasers to send solar energy from satellites to Earth-based receivers. If successful, it’ll open the door to a kind of clean energy previously found only in sci-fi — and maybe even save American lives.
IN THE KNOW
OpenAI’s structure evolves
By @OpenAI on X
OpenAI was founded in 2015 with the mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence, if/when it is achieved, would benefit all of humanity, not just a few powerful companies. At the time, it made sense to OpenAI’s co-founders to set the organization up as a non-profit — this would help ensure its AI researchers would prioritize safety and public benefits over potential monetization. Ten years and one wildly expensive app later, the company has announced plans to change its structure — though not exactly in the way CEO Sam Altman was hoping.
MORE ON THIS STORY
FREETHINK VOICES
The missing tech case for how we create an era of abundance
by Peter Leyden
In March, journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published their new nonfiction book, “Abundance.” In it, they argue that America’s current political and economic frameworks have created a nation of scarcity and that we’ll need to revamp these systems to become a nation of abundance, one with plenty of houses, jobs, and everything else our citizens need. In this week’s Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, Peter Leyden digs into the role AI could play in creating this new America — and why he thinks abundance proponents should be talking about tech more.
WORTH SHARING
Why we need social innovation now more than ever
Creating a world of abundance, where everyone has everything they need, is possible, but we aren’t there yet. Right now, many people in many places are living with scarcity — they don’t have enough healthcare, enough food, enough support. Freethink recently partnered with the Skoll Foundation to show how local innovators are solving these crises through social innovation, which seeks to create long-term solutions by empowering the people closest to the problem.
