Most importantly, none of these statements should be made in public. The company stands to gain much more with a dignified silence and a personal explanation to the hapless individual, than by wringing the dirty laundry out in public. That an individual employee is immature / causes a stink, happens every second of every day. That a company CEO does the same is unacceptably poor management, and poor PR.
I disagree. "Dignified silence" is effectively what doomed Brendon Eich as Mozilla's CEO. If you say nothing, you let other people define the narrative. I agree with uncoder0, a single simple dignified response would have easily deflated this whole thing.
yes I can see the need to manage the narrative. But this is bad management of the narrative, because a clearly emotional CEO is letting his anger show, instead of, as you clearly point out, being dignified and making a concise statement of the facts. The statement is not concise (in itself showing a tendency towards a rant), nor does it display the necessary humility towards an employee, who, no matter his faults, no longer has a job (unlike the CEO).
I disagree, when statements like that are made in such a public area it will possibly negatively affect who decides to apply for a position at reddit. A dignified response on the reddit blog would have been the right move imo