Bluesky CEO Jay Graber stepping back, former WordPress parent chief Toni Schneider named interim boss

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said Monday that she will be stepping down and transitioning to the company's chief innovation officer. Graber announced the transition in a post on the platform."As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things," Graber wrote.The announcement names Toni Schneider, former CEO of Automattic and a partner at True Ventures, as the interim CEO. Automattic is the parent company of WordPress.Graber wrote in the announcement that both Automattic and True Ventures are investors in Bluesky.Bluesky was founded within Twitter by Jack Dorsey in 2019. Graber became CEO of Bluesky in 2021, spinning it off from Twitter into its own company. Bluesky and Twitter worked closely until Elon Musk acquired the platform, now known as X, in 2022. The entities ended the service agreement in late 2022.Musk's takeover and name change shook up the social media landscape as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of X competitor Threads in July 2023.Following the 2024 election, users flocked from X to Bluesky as the burgeoning social platform saw a wave of growth, going from 15.2 million total users on Nov. 13, 2024, to over 21 million by Nov. 21, 2024.In January 2025, Bluesky said the platform had around 28 million total users. As of last month, that number has grown to 42 million, according to its website.The number is a fraction of the numbers boasted by X and Threads, which count monthly users in the hundreds of millions, TechCrunch reported in January.Graber told CNBC in November 2024 that one of the things that separates it from the others is that it's "billionaire-proof," because everything is open source."What happened to Twitter couldn't happen to us in the same ways because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over," she said.Got a confidential news tip? We want to hear from you.Sign up for free newsletters and get more CNBC delivered to your inboxGet this delivered to your inbox, and more info about our products and services.© 2026 Versant Media, LLC.

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