Bluesky CEO Jay Graber says X-rival is ‘billionaire-proof’

Bluesky has surged in popularity since the presidential election earlier this month and has suddenly become a competitor to Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Thread. But CEO Jay Graber has some words of caution for potential acquirers: Bluesky is “billionaire proof.”

In an interview Thursday with CNBC’s “Money Movers,” Graber said Bluesky’s open design is intended to allow users to leave the service with all their followers, which could thwart potential acquisition efforts.

“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 said. “What happened with Twitter couldn’t happen to us in the same ways because you always wanted to be able to move immediately without having to start over.”

Graber was referring to the way millions of users left Twitter, now X, after Musk bought the company in 2022. Bluesky now has over 21 million users, still surpassed by X and Threads, which Facebook’s parent debuted in July 2023.

X and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Threads has about 275 million monthly users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in October. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates 318 million monthly users in October.

Bluesky was created in 2019 as an internal Twitter project during Jack Dorsey’s second term as CEO and became an independent public purpose company in 2022. In May of this year, Dorsey said he is no longer a member of Bluesky’s board.

“In 2019 Jack had a vision for something better for social media and that’s why he chose me to build this and we’re really grateful to him for setting this up and we’ve continued to execute this, ” said Graber, who previously founded Happening, a social network focused on events. “We’re building an open source social network that anyone can own and build on, and it’s something that’s radically different than anything that’s been done in social media before. No one has been this open , so transparent and put a lot of control in the hands of the users.”

Part of Bluesky’s business plan involves offering subscriptions that give users access to special features, Graber noted. She also said Bluesky will add more services for third-party coders as part of the startup’s “developer ecosystem.”

Graber said Bluesky has ruled out the ability to let advertisers send algorithmically recommended ads to users.

“There’s a lot on the road map, and I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do to make money,” Graber said. “We’re not going to build an algorithm that just pushes ads to you and locks users in. That’s not our model.”

Bluesky has previously experienced large growth spurts. In September, it added 2 million users following X’s suspension in Brazil due to violations of the country’s content moderation policy and related legal matters.

In October Bluesky announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital. The company has raised a total of $36 million, according to Pitchbook.