this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Disturbingly, there is really no way to know who actually owns a private company like Reddit. Once it goes public, then the owners will be the shareholders (and in reality, the owners are the major shareholders who have a controlling stake).
The only clue to the current ownership is whatever management wishes to disclose. Spez wrote a blog post in 2021 indicating that they issued $250M in "series E funding" to existing and new investors.
If there are any finance bros around here, they may be able to dig up some sort of disclosures from bond auctions to try and see who bought it.
The only confirmed investor I know about is Tencent. They invested in 2019. Its possible they were also some of the "existing investors" Spez referred to in 2021.
Bottom line: nobody knows who owns Reddit. But apparently the owners think this guy Spez is a good fit to run their company, somehow.
He's exactly what they want. A complete straw man with a hateable face, a genuine Nimrod that thinks he's the smartest guy in any room he's ever been in. Sprinkle in being a privelaged yes man and he's the perfect face for an ownership group that wants to remain anonymous. He's literally Tom from Succession, might even be who that character is based on IRL.
The older redditors may remember that he was moderator of some VERY dodgy subreddits back in the day and tried to cover it up. We remember, it will come back to haunt him at some point.
If you can sate my curiosity, what dodgy subreddits?
/r/jailbait
It's difficult to prove these days as most of that era was wiped and the internet archive doesnt have much from that time.
There are some people saying it was possible to add arbitrary users as mods for a while, some that say he made himself a mod as part of cleaning up that subreddit. but a lot of people also say he was a mod for a very long time.