It looks like it means that even the founders of Ethereum intended to enable fraud, disguising large institutional investors as many individual investors so that the market would be mislead about the popularity of ethereum.
Or to be frank - the messsage to the non-crypto audience is this:"Yet again, the crypto guys seem to be scamming each other, stay the hell away".
Ether is in part premined. Before the token went public, a select few insiders were able to buy lots of it at practically no cost.
Here the co-founder explains how to buy more than the agreed maximum per holder, by simply creating multiple accounts to buy them. The founder actively encourages fraud and does it on record.
Maybe, but it was under the pretense that the project was intending to be "decentralized", not controlled by whales who followed the founders' advise of disguising their purchases.
The point is that the founders apparently intended for large whales to disguise their purchases. This means individuals bought into a system that was advertised as being decentralized, when it was apparently intended to merely /appear/ to be decentralized. Remember Ethereum is planning on moving to "proof of stake".
Or to be frank - the messsage to the non-crypto audience is this:"Yet again, the crypto guys seem to be scamming each other, stay the hell away".