I just had to check, reddit isn't publicly traded yet. My best explanation was that spez had a strawman short 200x the amount of reddit stocks and then run the site so hard into the ground that even Musk would go whoa and Malagassy geophysicists would be getting strange readings on their seismographs.

Now? No, they're not actively trying to kill reddit. It's the classic case of someone who got lucky with a startup and didn't hand it off before crashing it.