A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO | Reddit warned us that its users were a risk factor, and boy do they sound excited about shorting its stock.::Reddit seems like a likely candidate for a meme stock. But the actual reaction suggests that r/WallStreetBets isn’t going to send the stock to the moon.
Also this scrambling to make Reddit “profitable” and fucking Spez pays himself nearly $200 million a year. Fucking ridiculous. Burn it down. Build something better that hasn’t been captured by complete twats.
Nintendo CEO cutting his salary in half to avoid laying off workers after the Wii U fails versus whatever the fuck Reddit is doing
I hate Huffman as much as the next guy, but the $193 million factoid is misleading clickbait nonsense. His actual salary is apparently $400k, the rest is “stock value” or whatever. Reddit is not giving 25% of its yearly revenue to the CEO.
This argument is oft repeated but It’s Bullshit. If it wasn’t valuable why is Spez okay with it?
Stock grants not being direct Income isn’t clickbait nonsense. It’s actually DELIBERATE: Spez doesn’t pay income taxes on a majority of his income. Capital gains tax has a lot of loopholes that can be exploited.
This just gives spez more money and he can cash out in the IPO.
For anyone that’s fallen for the “{wealthy person} doesn’t actually have ${huge number} because it’s stock” thing, here’s how it works.
- Wealthy people with lots of stock get access to very, very cheap credit. Not credit cards like the plebs get with a 23% APR, multi million dollar lines of credit from places like Goldman Sachs with hyper low interest rates.
- Wealthy people use that credit to live indistinguishably from a person that actually has the vast wealth that they have access to. Spez might “only” make $400k but if he has access to $50M in cheap credit it spends all the same.
- Wealthy people enjoying their access to cheap credit which spends the same as income then get to dodge income taxes and instead use the more favorable capital gains tax rates.
- As a fun bonus, they also get to go “you morons I don’t have $200M that’s all just on paper, I only pay myself $10 a year because I’m a man of the people. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get on this private jet”
You might be wondering, why do they get this cheap credit? Because it’s a very safe bet for the financial institute, they are acting as a sort of time arbitrage mechanism for the person they are extending credit to. Since they perform this function they can be relatively assured that this will allow their client to sell their stocks, not because they have to cover expenses, but because capital gains protections and the market is favorable. It also aids in fostering a positive relationship with someone with a lot of wealth which is something financial institutes have an interest in doing.
All the actors are doing what’s in their rational self-interest. The end result is that Spez can access a large part of that $200M as liquid cash right now through credit with one hand and with the other wave you off and say “those are stocks I actually only got paid $400k”
How do they pay back those low-interest loans? I’ve always been curious.
Reminder that shorting is a high risk play and you should never make investment decisions out of spite.
And while Huffman now thinks that Reddit as a corpus of training data for AI is valuable, he let his board member Sam Altman siphon off Reddit data for free; Altman was, and still is, the CEO of OpenAI. Altman’s also Reddit’s third-largest shareholder and owns more than twice as many shares as Huffman. Altman was the CEO of Reddit for eight days.
Say what now
Huffman also made $193 million bucks, according to the article.
How much is a dollar buck in USD?
Nobody’s doing shit with this stock.
It’s all a manufactured cover story for hedge fund/institutional manipulation to blame retail for volatility and attempted fleecing.
