I don't think it's as nefarious as that. What people are calling the "public" position here is the value of preferred stock sold in a financing, and the "internal" valuation is the value of common stock. They're different things - the preferred stock has downside protection and other special rights that make it more valuable than the common stock so it should have a different price. These internal valuation reports pretty explicitly calculate the value of the common stock as a discount applied to the preferred stock price, due to the rights and liquidation preferrence and the fact that the common is not freely tradable.
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