It can be for-profit but it can’t be publicly traded. The reason we lost Twitter is because they legally had to sell to Elon. The reason we’ll lose Reddit is because they are going public and will legally be required to chase the money.
Of course, anyone at all who cares about money would have been a fool not to force him to buy it once he screwed up by bluffing in a way that made him contractually obligated to execute the transaction! So in practice, since even super-rich people love getting more money and non-rich people really want to become rich, good luck in practice spinning a hypothetical where Twitter owners would have said no, especially considering what a dog the company was already in terms of making money.