Bluesky CEO Jay Graber subtly roasts Mark Zuckerberg with bold T-Shirt choice, sending social media into a frenzy; here's what her message conveyed

At this year’s South by Southwest festival, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber made a quiet but pointed statement wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the Latin phrase “Mundus sine caesaribus” (“a world without Caesars”). The message was a direct clapback at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who months earlier had sported a similar shirt reading “aut Zuck aut nihil”, a twist on the ancient slogan “aut Caesar aut nihil” (“either a Caesar or nothing”).

Graber’s fashion choice wasn’t just a meme; it encapsulated Bluesky’s mission to dismantle the idea of a social media emperor ruling over users. “Our infrastructure shouldn’t be controlled by one CEO,” Bluesky’s Emily Liu told Huffington Post, framing the platform’s decentralized model as a rebellion against Zuckerberg’s—or any billionaire’s dominance.

What is Bluesky about?

Bluesky, which started as a Twitter-backed project under Jack Dorsey in 2019, spun off as an independent company in 2021 with Graber at the helm. A software engineer and cryptography advocate, Graber cut her teeth building decentralized systems, including contributing to the privacy-focused Zcash cryptocurrency.

What is her vision for Bluesky?

A social network where users own their data, customize their algorithms, and can jump ship to rival apps if the platform loses its way. “If a billionaire bought Bluesky tomorrow, users could just leave,” Graber explained at SXSW, highlighting the platform’s open-source “AT Protocol” that lets developers fork the network.

This ethos resonated post-2024 election, as over 115,000 users fled Elon Musk’s X, where pro-Trump rhetoric surged. Bluesky’s daily traffic spiked 500 per cent, with Graber noting a million new users daily in November. Unlike X’s top-down chaos, Bluesky lets users tweak content filters, mute topics, or even create bespoke feeds—a stark contrast to Musk’s “free speech absolutism.”

Graber, a UC Berkeley grad with a knack for bridging tech and activism, has quietly become a thorn in Silicon Valley’s side. Before Bluesky, she co-founded Happening, an event-planning tool focused on privacy, and authored essays critiquing centralized power in tech. Colleagues describe her as a “low-key disruptor” who is more interested in code than celebrity. While Zuckerberg and Musk feud publicly, Graber’s strategy leans on quiet infrastructure shifts—building tools that let communities self-govern.

FAQs:

Who is the CEO of Bluesky?
The current chief executive at Bluesky is Jay Graber.