Reddit Shares Surge In IPO

Jill Goldsmith
·2 min read
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Shares of message board master Reddit headed sky high Thursday as the company launched its initial public offering. The stock was up nearly 60% from its midday at about $54, giving it a market cap of $8..8 billion. It’s a great showing for the biggest tech offering in some time since Reddit had set the IPO price at $34 a share.

The company filed for its IPO late last month. It trades on the NYSE under the symbol RDDT. The move had been anticipated for years by the company, which was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian and Aaron Swartz. It boasts 100k+ communities, or subreddits, including wallstreetbets, the home of meme stock traders who upended Wall Street in 2021, taking shares of GameStop and others to the moon.

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n a letter attached, Huffman said, “The communities of Reddit help people at a scale that I never imagined might be possible,” calling it “a vibrant community, a constantly evolving place where anyone, anywhere, can connect with like-minded people and dive into any topic. The conversation ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, the trivial to the existential, the comic to the serious.”

“Reddit is not a social media platform optimized for self-display; it is a community that rewards candor and honest advice.”

Besides providing cash, going public will help turn users into owners as the company said it is inviting users and moderators to buy shares in the IPO, alongside investors. The company will also reserve about 1% of its common stock to fund community-related programs

As Deadline reported, the ownership base of Reddit after the IPO is also slated to include a few familiar media and tech names. Advance Magazine Publishers, the owner of Condé Nast controlled by the Newhouse Family, is set to have a 26.5% stake in the company, while China’s Tencent will have 9.7% and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman 7.6%.

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