Steve Huffman
Chief Executive Officer
2015 – Present
11 years (current)
Key Decisions & Impact
Huffman co-founded Reddit in 2005, left in 2009 to found travel startup Hipmunk, then returned to Reddit as CEO in 2015 after Ellen Pao's contentious departure. He has led Reddit through its 2024 IPO and the pivot toward data licensing, signing agreements with Google (about $60 million a year) and OpenAI (about $70 million a year) to license Reddit's conversational data for AI training.
Legacy
Under Huffman's second tenure as CEO, Reddit revenue reached $2.2 billion in FY2025, up 69%, with advertising still the core business (about 95% of revenue) but data licensing emerging as a fast-growing, high-margin new line. His willingness to publicly clash with parts of Reddit's own user community over policy changes -- including the 2023 API pricing dispute that triggered widespread subreddit blackouts -- demonstrated a management approach prioritizing long-term monetization over short-term community goodwill. Huffmans approach reflects a broader industry tension between platform companies desire to monetize user bases and those same users expectations of the free, ad-light experience that originally attracted them. Media coverage of Reddit governance consistently returns to this fundamental tension between platform monetization and community trust as the defining strategic challenge of Huffmans tenure. This dynamic has become a recurring theme in technology-journalism coverage of Reddit strategic direction under Huffmans leadership.