Meet Jay Graber, the young female CEO of X alternative Bluesky: she just wore a T-shirt trolling Mark Zuckerberg to SXSW, and developed her own ‘time-based’ bank while still at university

Mar 17 , 2025

Meet Jay Graber, CEO of X alternative Bluesky. Photo: Getty Images

Unlike billionaire social media owners Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, Graber deploys a collectivist approach to Bluesky, which now has over 30 million users

“A world without Caesars.” With this message emblazoned in Latin on her black T-shirt, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber greeted a standing-room-only audience at this month’s South by Southwest festival.

Graber’s outfit cleverly referenced a well-publicised sweatshirt worn months earlier by Meta’s billionaire boss Mark Zuckerberg, the world’s second richest man. His shirt had proclaimed “Aut Zuck aut nihil,” riffing on the Latin phrase meaning “Either Caesar or nothing” – except putting his own name in as a nod to his reputation for ruthlessly conquering new markets.

Graber’s counter slogan “was our cheeky way of saying there shouldn’t be just one person making all the decisions,” explained Bluesky’s chief operating officer Rose Wang in an interview with Agence France-Presse.

“We’ve seen what happens when one person takes over a platform overnight,” she added.

Making such a statement at SXSW carries significance.

The weeklong jamboree of tech conferences, music and film is where Twitter first emerged in 2007, beginning its journey to become the heartbeat of global conversation before eventually catching the attention of Elon Musk, the world’s richest person.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, presents a prototype of smart glasses capable of projecting digital objects onto transparent lenses at the Meta Connect developer conference last September. Photo: DPA

Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter, since renamed X, transformed the platform into a channel for his increasingly hard-right viewpoints and the de facto official outlet for Donald Trump’s second presidential term. As this Musk-led transformation took shape, developers – including Zuckerberg himself – quickly created alternatives.

Tech blogger Mike Masnick, whose paper inspired Bluesky’s creation, describes the platform as a response to “learned helplessness” – the condition where people knowingly but reluctantly accept that “someone else controls life’s major interactions”.

The site first began as a side project at Twitter but became independent ahead of Musk’s buyout. Two women, Graber and Wang, now lead a team of about 20 people spread across the globe, and Bluesky currently has more than 30 million users and has been fast-expanding.