Unless the likelihood of getting caught is less than 50% in which case this was still the smart financial move for the company based on expected value. The way to get people to pay attention is to hold people involved in corporate misdeeds personally liable.

50% x (-$65M) + 50% x $34M = -$15.5M

You'd need better than 50-50 odds. ;)

Math is off it's

0.5 * -65M + 1 * 34M = +1.5M

They get the +34M 100% of the time, not 50%, they didn't have to surrender it.

No, much more than $34M in misbehavior. Hurt customers by $34M over what they would have been charged if they had paid commissions.

So Robinhood took money from its customers to this extent: all the cash as if its customers were paying commissions, and also $34M, and for that they're being fined $65M, which will probably be negotiated down to $2M or something like that.

The 34 million calculation is only for "certain" orders. I think this means some trades would be advantageous under the RH model (small trades where a $5 fixed commission would overwhelm any percentage), some trades would be disadvantageous under the RH model (very large value trades), and they only summed the comparative fees on the disadvantageous trades.

This might make sense: if users were knowledgeable and had multiple brokers, they may execute at the better trade-specific broker for each trade, so adding up just the potential bads gives some perspective. But on the other hand, it's not a perfect indicator for Robinhood's net gain as its omitting trades where Robinhood's structure leads to lower commission.