To me, it comes across as a clumsy attempt to open a new line of negotiation, one which headed in the direction of Reddit buying Apollo outright.

Christian is clearly thinking on his feet, so obviously he doesn't have a value proposition for reddit. All he is really doing is letting reddit know he might be open to it, the details could be negotiated later.

Reddit clearly has all the power here (Apollo is fully dependant on reddit), so they would have been able to negotiate it down. Maybe all the way to $1 million?

Anyway, reddit clearly weren't open to it, so it fell flat on it's face.

Yeah. I think Christian meant to say 1 million.

That means, if you pay 1 million now, it would be less than the cost to upkeep for 30 days and it would we a win win

I think he was trying to point out the ridiculousness of Reddit’s claim that Apollo is costing them $20m/year, but agreed, it didn’t really land.

1) Yes, but you could lose a lot of reddit's actual power users. See: Current Situation. :P

2) Yes, this is better for reddit but untenable for Apollo.

3) If you buy the app that makes your site SING, that everyone loves, then you keep all those users, and make money from them instead of losing them.

Also, don't forget that everything before an IPO is magnified. This has cost reddit perhaps hundreds of millions now in bad press and lowered valuation.

He's saying that he wants a fair deal where he can make money running his app. If Reddit has a good-faith belief that he can do $20M in revenue on his app, then they should be happy to buy the app for $10M and use it to drive $20M in revenue that goes to Reddit. In-context this seems pretty clear. Also in-context it seems pretty clear that Reddit is aware that their sudden price increase has made the Apollo app's value negative with no chance to keep it going.