Do you even underpants gnomes bro?

The most likely theory I've seen so far is that he wants to make it Free in the Parler/4chan sense, using the positive karma balance behind the word Freenode to legitimize it. This, like all other theories, is not supported by strong enough evidence that it can be declared certain.

Dictators gonna dictate.

I think the answer is that it doesn't, and what he actually wanted was the minor prestige of (sort of) owning and funding (part of) Freenode and having his company's logo in the corner of the site whilst leaving the actual operations to the existing staff. That is to say, basically the same status quo as the last few years.

From what I can tell, somewhere along the line some of the staff decided that wasn't OK and kicked out the person who'd actually been in charge of the network since the founder died, his newly-appointed replacement demanded that the Freenode domain be transferred to him personally and rejected Lee and others' suggestion of giving control of it to the community instead, and things went downhill from there with attempts to lock Lee and people seen as affiliated with him out of the network, threats of mass resignations and bogus claims of unprecedented advertising intrusion on the Freenode site, selling people's personal info, etc...