I believe this is CYA (cover your ass) language. Given the recent interest in the case, he's likely saying now that he didn't intend to (or that even if he intended to, he didn't think it was within his power) as a pre-emptive defense against litigation.

It's more likely that he thought he was nowhere near influential enough to create one on his own. He would previously have had no reason to believe that his public statements would move the market.

That's exactly what I mean. Even if he thought he had some power, or acted as if he did, it's in his best interest to downplay that as much as possible.

This guy was a well known poster. I'm sure he thought he had some power to motivate wsb users to invest, but he might not have predicted he had enough power such that he would get embroiled in an investigation. Regardless of how "internet-tuff-guy" people are, most people really don't like to suddenly be thrown into the limelight of a financial fraud investigation, even if they are innocent of any crimes.

Thus, the CYA language. Better to get out in front and claim ignorance just in case.

While the narrative has made him the poster boy, you can look at the past discussions regarding GME. His initial posts around a value play were widely ridiculed.

The short squeeze thesis(s) were made by other reddit users. Even those weren't particularly popular until around 1/13-1/15 when GME saw an unexpected pop. It was around then people were like "oh this squeeze thing might happen. we could test it"

There is zero chance of this hypothetical lawsuit (that alleges market manipulation/creating a squeeze using just $50k worth of cash, which is a laughable amount of money when it comes to the market) not getting thrown out of court the instant it lands on the court clerk's desk.

Saying there's a chance of something happening doesn't mean you intend it to or are advocating for it though.

if you trawl his reddit account, he mentioned 9 months ago there's a possibility of a short squeeze of some sort happening sometime.

It’s possible that when he said that, the short percentage was not greater than 100% of the floating shares, as they are now.

It seems like he was investing for the long haul, because of the stock and the company’s fundamentals.

But, the phenomenon now is the short squeeze, because of the excessive shorts over the available floating shares.

I believe he has a youtube video from 6 months ago titled something like "> 100% short interest, short squeeze possible".