Bilowski’s popularity has soared since the presidential election earlier this month, suddenly making him a contender for Elon Musk’s X and of meta Threads But CEO Jay Graber has some words of caution for potential acquirers: Blusky is “billionaire proof.”
In an interview with CNBC’s “Money Movers” on Thursday, Graber said Blusky’s open design is intended to give users the option to leave the service with all their followers, which could thwart potential acquisition efforts. .
“Billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone buys or if the Bluesky company goes under, everything is open source,” Graber said. “What happened to Twitter can’t happen to us the same way, because you always have the option to move immediately without doing any work.”
Graber was referring to how millions of users left Twitter, now X, after Elon Musk bought the company in 2022. Blusky now has more than 21 million users, still dwarfing X and Threads, which parent Facebook debuted in July 2023.
X and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in October that Threads has about 275 million monthly users. Musk though said In May that X had 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimated 318 million monthly users by October.
Blusky was created in 2019 as an internal Twitter project during Jack Dorsey’s second CEO, and became an independent public benefit corporation in 2022. In May of this year, Dorsey said he was no longer a member of Blusky’s board.
“In 2019, Jack had a vision to do something better for social media, and so he chose me to build it, and we’re really grateful to him for setting it up, and we continued,” said Graber, who previously founded Happening, a social network focused on events. “We’re building an open-source social network that anyone can pick up and build on, and it’s something that’s radically different from anything that’s been done in social media before. Users control in the hands of
Part of Bluesky’s business plan includes offering subscriptions that would give users access to exclusive features, Graber noted. It 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 possibility of allowing advertisers to send users algorithm-recommended ads.
“There’s a lot on the roadmap, and I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do for monetization,” Graber said. “We’re not going to build an algorithm that just pushes ads at you, turning users off. That’s not our model.”
Bluesky has experienced a huge growth spurt before. In September, it added 2 million users following the suspension of X in Brazil over violations of the country’s content moderation policy and related legal issues.
In October, Bluesky announced That it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital. According to Pitchbook, the company has raised a total of $36 million.
look: It remains to be seen how the Trump administration will handle the Google antitrust proceedings.
