Robinhoods new Chinese competition forces Congress hand to demand more information
In the world of no-fee and low-fee brokers, Robinhood is the leader, but it’s facing increasingly stiff competition from an upstart known as Webull, founded by one of the top executives from Chinese-based e-commerce giant Alibaba.And it’s Webull’s ties to China — seen increasingly as a US adversary — that could pose a major roadblock to the company’s ambitious plans for expansion, The Post has learned.As The Post has reported, Congress has been demanding information about how US securities regulators are overseeing Webull’s safekeeping of customer data.Now a group of attorneys general from red states have launched a probe into the company’s ties to the mainland and its ruling Chinese Communist Party, or CCP.The incoming Trump administration, and the China skeptics he’s nominated in Marco Rubio as secretary of state, Matt Gaetz as AG, and whoever gets the nod for Treasury, will likely turn up the heat even more, I am told.People close to the matter say the interest from various government entities comes amid an apparent delay in Webull’s plans to list on the Nasdaq through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.A spokesman for Webull and the firm’s outside counsel at WilmerHale in DC didn’t return numerous emails and calls for comment.The concerns echo some of the issues US regulators have with uber-popular China-owned short-video app TikTok — worries the CCP is siphoning user data for espionage purposes since the surveillance state there basically controls every company on its soil.Both Republicans and Democrats have debated for years whether to ban TikTok, worried about the potential for identity theft, the CCP gleaning “biometric identifiers” and search history of its 170 million US users.In 2021, Trump left office before he could do anything substantive with TikTok.
(He settled on a forced sale to a US company, Oracle, run by his friend Larry Ellison, that never materialized).Joe Biden actually signed a TikTok ban, set ...