Bluesky CEO Makes A Jab At Mark Zuckerberg With Her T-Shirt

Jay Graber, the CEO of the microblogging social media site Bluesky, sent a message to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a T-shirt she wore at South by Southwest.

During a SXSW panel on Monday, Graber wore a black shirt that read “Mundus sine caesaribus,” a Latin phrase that translates to “a world without Caesars.” The tee is a jab at Zuckerberg, who in September wore a black tee in the same style that read “aut Zuck aut nihil,” a play on the Latin phrase “aut Caesar aut nihil,” which translates to “either a Caesar or nothing.”

“We believe that our shared communication infrastructure is too important to be left in the hands of a single CEO or company,” Bluesky’s head of special projects, Emily Liu, explained to HuffPost. “Jay’s shirt translates to ‘a world without Caesars,’ a vision that Bluesky has for the open network that we are building — one that returns meaningful choice and ownership to each individual user, instead of a single CEO.”

Meta did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Bluesky originally began as a research initiative at Twitter by the company’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey before Twitter became X. But in 2021, Bluesky became an independent company, and Graber took over.

On Bluesky, users can choose which algorithms are on their feed, and Bluesky operates as a decentralized social network.

At the South by Southwest panel, Graber implied she isn’t interested in a billionaire taking over Bluesky.

“If a billionaire came in and bought Bluesky, or took it over, or if I decided tomorrow to change things in a way that people really didn’t like, then they could fork off and go on to another application,” Graber said. “There’s already applications in the network that give you another way to view the network, or you could build a new one as well. And so that openness guarantees that there’s always the ability to move to a new alternative.”

After the 2024 U.S. election, X users flocked to Bluesky. More than 115,000 people deactivated their accounts on X, which is now owned by billionaire Elon Musk, one of President Donald Trump’s biggest supporters. Bluesky saw a 500% increase in daily use traffic.

“We’ve been growing by about a million users a day for several days,” Graber told NPR in November. “It’s proving out the model that we thought would be the right approach to social [media]: Give people the tools to control their experience and they’ll have a better time.”