Meet Jay Graber, who is stepping down as Bluesky's CEO to return to 'building new things' as chief innovation officer

Early life

Jay Graber was born Lantian Graber in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a mother who is an immigrant from China during the Cultural Revolution and a father of Swiss descent. Her mother, who is an acupuncturist, named Graber "Lantian", which means "blue sky" in Chinese, as a wish that she would have "boundless freedom." She was aptly named for the job she would eventually be given.

Her father is a mathematics teacher, and in a 2024 profile of Graber in Cosmico, he is cited as a source of intellectual and academic influence for Graber.

Education

At the University of Pennsylvania, Graber studied Science, Technology & Society, which is an interdisciplinary program that examines how technological innovation intersects with culture, politics, and ethics.

Rather than focusing solely on coding or engineering, the program allowed Graber to explore the broader systems that shape how technology is developed and utilized, an approach that later influenced her views on social networks and digital governance.

Some of her key guiding views include a decentralized internet and open source social media protocols. "We believe that the protocol is the fundamental guarantee on freedom of speech," Graber said once during an interview with Fast Company.

Before Bluesky

Graber's early career unfolded during the first wave of blockchain innovation in the mid-2010s. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she began her career as a software engineer at SkuChain, a startup focused on utilizing blockchain for supply-chain management. Around the same time, she also built and soldered bitcoin-mining rigs, deepening her technical grasp of decentralized systems beyond software.

Between 2016 and 2018, Graber joined the privacy-focused cryptocurrency project Zcash as a junior developer, contributing to one of the most advanced implementations of zero-knowledge proofs. Later, in 2019, she founded Happening, Inc., an events app that aimed to help communities organize and connect through shared experiences.

Happening, Inc. never really took off, but these early roles grounded Graber in both the engineering and ideological foundations of decentralized technology, which later shaped the vision for Bluesky as an open, user-controlled social network.

Joining Bluesky

When Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Twitter, first announced Bluesky in late 2019, it was a small, Twitter-funded initiative tasked with researching an open and decentralized standard for social media.

By August 2021, Dorsey decided to onboard Graber, who was then known in crypto circles for her work on Zcash and decentralized community tools, to lead and accelerate the effort. However, according to an April 2025 profile of Graber in the New Yorker, she quickly realized that for Bluesky to fulfill its mission, it needs to create a social protocol separate from any single corporation and maintain independence from Twitter.

With Dorsey's backing, Graber negotiated a formal spin-out by October 2021 and incorporated Bluesky as a public benefit corporation, a legal structure that allowed it to prioritize user benefits and open standards over shareholder profit.

Twitter provided an initial $13 million in funding to give the new entity "freedom and independence to get started," as Dorsey publicly described at the time.

Bluesky's rise

Graber's early move to separate Bluesky from Twitter may have saved it.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and renamed the platform X, Bluesky's independence allowed it to thrive and emerge as a competitor to X as droves of users left the platform.

In September 2023, Bluesky only had around 1 million registered users, but this figure climbed to more than 20 million by the end of November 2024. The meteoric rise came after a user surge in Brazil after X was temporarily restricted there, as well as 1.25 million user gains the week after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election.

As of November 2025, Bluesky has around 40 million registered users. That is no match for X's roughly 560 million users, but it provided an alternative for those dissatisfied with X's ownership and content moderation.

Calling out Big Tech

Graber has taken a subtle dig at Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

During SXSW in Austin in March 2025, Graber wore a black T-shirt that reads "Mundus sine caesaribus," meaning "a world without Caesars." The design and font are widely interpreted as a response to Zuckerberg's own Latin slogan shirt, which reads "Aut Zuck aut nihil," meaning "either Zuck or nothing."

The shirt drew public curiosity, and Bluesky began selling the same shirt. A spokesperson for the company told Business Insider at the time that the shirts sold out in 30 minutes, representing the company's "democratic approach, where no single CEO or company controls your experience online."

A modest net worth

Compared to other Silicon Valley CEOs who run major social media platforms, all of whom are billionaires, Graber has a very modest net worth.

Estimates of Graber's net worth fall between $2.95 million and $5 million, mostly depending on her equity in Bluesky. Since Bluesky is not a publicly traded company, Graber's stake in the company and her annual compensation are not publicly disclosed.

As of early 2025, Bluesky's valuation is estimated to be around $700 million.

A 'billionaire-proof' platform

Graber positions Bluesky as a new kind of social network.

Bluesky is built on an open-source Authenticated Transfer Protocol, which decentralizes social networking and hands more control to users rather than a single company or executive.

"The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source," Graber told CNBC in an interview in November 2024.

"What happened to Twitter couldn't happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over," Graber added, referring to Musk's purchase of the platform that is now named X.

Unlike traditional social platforms like X or Facebook, Bluesky is built on an open-source ecosystem called the ATmosphere, powered by the Authenticated Transfer Protocol. The system gives users the ability to design and customize their own ranking algorithms, carry their posts and followers with them across different apps, and avoid being subject to any platform's arbitrary or politically driven moderation decisions.

Activism on Bluesky

Bluesky became a platform widely used by progressive activists and community organizers.

The Tesla Takedown movement, a pushback against Tesla CEO Elon Musk's involvement with Donald Trump and the White House's DOGE office, famously spread via Bluesky when actor Alex Winter contacted a sociologist in Boston to build a website where people could organize local protests.

But the progressiveness of Bluesky also seems to have spooked some politicians. Semafor's media reporter Max Tani wrote in May 2025 that some congressional staffers told him that they gave up on using Bluesky as an alternative to X, because "their bosses kept getting yelled at by Democratic users angry at their impotence."

Changing the ecosystem

Graber is unfazed by Bluesky's slower growth in terms of registered and active users.

In an interview in May with Fast Company, Graber said that reports of Bluesky's death are "greatly exaggerated" and that growth "comes in waves," with new communities being established at each stage.

"We're still seeing a lot of community formation, and one of the most exciting things is how structurally different this is," said Graber. "It's not just another social site that has to be a singular winner-take-all in an ecosystem with existing incumbents."

In 2025, Bluesky still added around 10 million newly registered users.

A warning against AI over-reliance

Graber has tips on how to thrive in an era of AI, and reliance is not the answer.

"AI can handle many reasoning tasks, but if we fully outsource our thinking, it's not good enough," Graber told Business Insider.

She added that for students, that might mean writing essays by hand to "build the muscle for critical thinking."

At Bluesky, Graber said AI is used for moderation and curation but never runs on its own, because while AI delivers packaged expertise, human value lies in judgment and adaptability.

For job seekers, Graber encourages workers to adopt a generalist mindset and master core skills such as writing and coding.

"If you don't know what good code looks like," she said, "you won't be able to evaluate AI's output."

Stepping down as CEO of Bluesky

Graber is starting a new era in 2026.

On March 9, Graber said in a public statement that she will be stepping down as Bluesky's CEO and transitioning into a position made just for her: chief innovation officer.

"As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things," Graber wrote in a blog on Bluesky.

"As we've grown, I've found that people thrive when they're in a role where their passions overlap with their strengths. This is as true for me as it is for our team," Graber added. "Transitioning to a more focused role where I can do what brings me energy is my way of putting that belief into practice."

Graber's new role focuses on Bluesky's technology stack rather than on growth and business operations. She will also play a role in choosing her successor. For now, venture capitalist Toni Schneider will be Bluesky's interim CEO.