Bluesky Social, an alternative to Twitter/X has been soaring in popularity, having just reached over 19 million registered users. Seeing that so much of the controversy around Twitter/X has been caused by it’s new owner, Elon Musk, it’s worth analyzing who owns Bluesky.

A Brief History of Bluesky Social

Believe it or not, Bluesky started as a project within Twitter. Then-CEO announced Bluesky in 2019, as an experiement of decentralizing Twitter. In 2021 Twitter hired Jay Graber as the lead for the project. A few months later, Graber decided that the project needed to become independant as “Twitter’s very entrenched existing incentives” made its independance neccesary. In February 2022, Bluesky became a public benefit LLC.

Does ownership matter?

Kind of, but less than for most other social media companies. Bluesky is based on an open source and decentralized framework. Like Twitter, Bluesky hosts short text and image content (called “Skeets” instead of tweets). Unlike Twitter, Bluesky is decentralized, designed in a way that any developer could create their own version of the platform. Users can even choose their own algorithm!

All that being said, ownership still controls the direction of Bluesky, and who will gain the most from this growing company.

Who Owns Bluesky?

Bluesky is owned and run by Bluesky Social, a public benefit corporation in Delaware. CEO Jay Graber holds a stake, and they have undergone two rounds of investement. Their $15 million Series A round was announced in October 2024, led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, and SevenX. Their seed round of $8 million was lead by Neo, a venture capital firm that has invested in startups including OpenAI and Ramp.