This could have been something that reddit pitched successfully to the site at the time - they could have acknowledged that folks don’t like ads and made a point of framing advertisers as entities choosing to support reddit and keep it free & functional - Reddit likes supporting “it’s own”. They could have facilitated and supported connections between advertisers and targeted communities in ways that bypass Reddit’s hostility towards ads and appeals to advertisers. Instead they just started serving ads.

And they didn’t just start serving ads, they started serving ads like the HeGetsUs campaign that were so poorly targeted that the community they’d built absolutely hated them.

There’s no stock or similar security, so the SEC doesn’t care at all. Could be a plausible deniability thing, I just think it’s more likely that he really is that dumb, given the stories about Tesla/SpaceX having teams that basically existed just to control him.

There’s no stock to tank. You could argue that he’s trying to tank the company, but there are easier ways to do that.