Reddit has hit its stride. After trudging through 19 years of almost entirely losing money, the platform recorded its first quarterly profit as a public company a year ago—and just posted its most lucrative financials yet. The company announced a net income of $163 million on Thursday, marking five consecutive quarters of profitability, about a year and a half after going public.

The market rewarded the company. Reddit’s stock closed at $208.95 on Friday, up 7.5% from the previous day and up 75% year over year. It was enough to bump the fortune of cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman up to $1.2 billion.

“Q3 was a strong quarter,” Huffman said on Thursday’s earnings call, in which he lauded Reddit as being “for humans by humans” and seemed to take a subtle dig at AI slop (the low-quality AI content clogging corners of the internet): “Reddit is in a unique position; we’re not trying to be the next anything. We’re focused on being the best version of ourselves and what the internet needs most: a place where people can connect on almost any topic and find genuinely useful information.”

Authentic human recommendations are a hot commodity these days. As bots and sponsored content crowd the internet, Reddit is often seen as a more reliable source of information, and its popularity has exploded in the past couple of years. Daily active users have approximately doubled since the summer of 2023. Google searches increasingly surface links to Reddit: Organic search to the platform is up over 560% from two years ago, per data from digital marketing firm Semrush.

Given that Facebook, Twitter (now X) and LinkedIn long ago minted a class of early-2000s social media billionaires, it may seem surprising that Huffman is so late to join that club. After all, Reddit was the world’s seventh-most visited website in September, according to Similarweb, ahead of LinkedIn, TikTok and Netflix. But that’s because Huffman, now 41, unloaded his founder’s stake in the then startup in 2006.

About a year after launching the company in June 2005, he and his partner Alexis Ohanian—now a venture capitalist married to tennis icon Serena Williams—sold out to Condé Nast for just $10 million. It seemed an enormous sum for them at the time, the pair has said. Without any plans for monetization, and overwhelmed with running the exploding platform with just a few employees, they viewed the acquisition as a rescue. Perhaps in the short term, but long term, they left massive sums on the table. By 2014, the company was valued at $500 million.

Ohanian, who joined Reddit’s board in 2014 but left in 2020, has said he did reacquire some shares while on the board, but likely gets most of his fortune from his many startup investments. Huffman, on the other hand, appears to be Reddit’s biggest individual shareholder these days. That’s because Reddit poached him back in 2015 to help navigate a streak of operational crises. His pay-for-performance compensation package has since allowed him to amass 3.1 million shares, or a 2.3% stake in the company. The rest of his fortune lies in Reddit stock options and $190 million in cash and other investments, Forbes estimates. Huffman declined to comment for this story.

While generous stock awards are common among the........

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