Misleading. At the point he was made a mod, the invite system didn't exist so you could just make people mods whenever you wanted. He might not have even noticed depending on how active his inbox was or how active he was.
The better questions would be why it wasn't banned after being nominated for subreddit of the year, and only got the axe after international attention via the Anderson Cooper segment.
Its not that he loved the subreddit, his (and by extension reddit corp) sociopathic ass simply views all that stuff as page views whether its memes, cp, or whatever. MBA cancer looking at everything as numbers.
Reddit, and the early 2000s Internet culture that spawned it had a more absolute view of free speech than the modern consensus. Reddit's rules were pretty much limited to:
Don't post things that are actually illegal to post
Don't break Reddit
The introduction of any other sitewide rules was controversial with the userbase at the time, and not because the average user was a creep who wanted to see teenagers in bikinis. People predicted (correctly) that other topics like piracy and darknet markets would eventually end up banned as Reddit tried to become more palatable to advertisers. People remain concerned that pornography will be banned or severely limited.
Its not that he loved the subreddit, his (and by extension reddit corp) sociopathic ass simply views all that stuff as page views
Let's be fair to spez; there's plenty to criticize him for, but he did not work at Reddit between roughly 2008 and 2016 when the jailbait controversy came up.
Stop listening to Andrew Tate and do your own reading. These sites are not reputable. Find me something coming from some place like Stanford or the NIH.