Bluesky CEO Jay Graber stepping back as Toni Schneider named interim

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said Monday he will step down from his position and become the company’s chief innovation officer. Graber announces transition Publish on platform.

“As Bluesky matures, the company needs an experienced operator focused on scale and execution, so I can get back to what I do best: building new things,” Graber wrote.

The announcement names Toni Schneider, former CEO of WordPress parent company Automattic and partner at True Ventures, as interim CEO.

Graber wrote in his announcement that both Automattic and True Ventures are investors in Bluesky.

Bluesky was founded on Twitter by Jack Dorsey in 2019. Graber became CEO of Bluesky in 2021, spinning it off from Twitter into his own company.

Bluesky and Twitter worked closely until Elon Musk acquired the platform, now known as X, in 2022. The organizations terminated the service agreement in late 2022.

Musk’s takeover and name change shook the social media landscape Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that X’s rival, Threads, will launch in July 2023.

Following the 2024 elections, users flocked from

Bluesky said in January 2025 that the platform had a total of 28 million users. According to the website, as of last month, this number increased to 42 million.

This figure is a fraction of what X and Threads boast, with monthly users in the hundreds of millions. TechCrunch It was reported in January.

Graber told CNBC in November 2024 that one of the things that sets it apart from others is that it’s “billionaire-proof” because everything is open source.

“What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us because you would always have the option to act immediately without having to start over,” he said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Schneider’s previous role.