The statement that was supposed to be a "threat" was something along the lines of "if you want Apollo to go quiet, you can buy out the app." In context, they were talking about how often Apollo sends API requests to Reddit's servers. If Reddit bought Apollo and made it into an official app, then it wouldn't have to use the public API, so it'd "go quiet" in that sense. The Apollo dev explained all this during the call, so Reddit didn't just misunderstand the context, they had to intentionally ignore it.
The statement that was supposed to be a "threat" was something along the lines of "if you want Apollo to go quiet, you can buy out the app." In context, they were talking about how often Apollo sends API requests to Reddit's servers. If Reddit bought Apollo and made it into an official app, then it wouldn't have to use the public API, so it'd "go quiet" in that sense. The Apollo dev explained all this during the call, so Reddit didn't just misunderstand the context, they had to intentionally ignore it.