Jay Graeber, CEO of Bluesky Social, speaks on stage at the 2025 Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies Summit and Celebration at the Jacob Javits Center on June 5, 2025 in New York City.
Eugene Gologulsky | Getty Images
BlueSky CEO Jay Graeber announced Monday that he will step down and move to become the company’s chief innovation officer. Graeber announced the transition in a post on the platform.
“As Bluesky matures, the company needs an experienced operator focused on scaling and execution, but I’m returning to what I do best: building new things,” Graber wrote.
In the announcement, Toni Schneider, former CEO of Automattic and partner at True Ventures, was named interim CEO. Automattic is the parent company of WordPress.
Graeber wrote in the announcement that both Automattic and True Ventures are investors in Bluesky.
Bluesky was founded within Twitter by Jack Dorsey in 2019. Graeber became CEO of Bluesky in 2021, spinning the company off from Twitter.
Bluesky and Twitter worked closely together until Elon Musk acquired the platform, now known as X, in 2022. The two companies terminated their service agreement at the end of 2022.
Musk’s acquisition and name change shook the social media landscape. meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that X’s competitor, Threads, will launch in July 2023.
After the 2024 elections, the fast-growing social platform experienced a wave of growth, with users flocking from X to Bluesky, going from 15.2 million total users on November 13, 2024 to over 21 million by November 21, 2024.
In January 2025, Blue Sky announced that the total number of users on its platform was approximately 28 million. As of last month, that number had grown to 42 million, according to the company’s website.
TechCrunch reported in January that this number is just a fraction of the numbers boasted by X and Threads, which have hundreds of millions of monthly users.
Graeber told CNBC in November 2024 that one thing that makes this different is that it’s “billionaire proof” because everything is open source.
“What happened to Twitter can’t happen to us in the same way, because we always have the option of moving right away without having to start over,” she said.
