Idk much about the CEO, the only reason why I mentioned him was to highlight that imo when it comes to brave people on lemmy judge the person not the product, and the product is good. I see no reason to dismiss it just because 1 guy (who probably haven't even touched it) out of 100s of employees did something that doesn't align with my morals. As far as I know brave makes money from it's ad program, bat value and other non browser services; VPN and premium versions of its search, llm, and talk. It doesn't have "the firefox deal" so as long as you disable brave ads and don't directly give them money there is no ethical conundrum regarding supporting a bad person.