CEO of a shelter
When it was officially launched in February 2023, Bluesky, the microblogging platform of which Jay Graber, 33, is the general director, got off to a timid start. Reserved for a limited number of subscribers, co-opted, it opens, a year later, to the greatest number and appears today as a refuge for those who want to flee X. Developed in 2019 within Twitter, Bluesky claims a hybrid status, specific to American legislation: it is a public benefit corporation, a company that aims for profit, while being concerned about the positive impacts it could have on society. Unlike its competitors, it works in open source : the technology is accessible to everyone and improves as users add it. The goal, explained Jay Graber in March to the information site The Verge: “Building a better social ecosystem for everyone. »
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers After the election of Donald Trump, Bluesky, competitor of X, is preparing to exceed 20 million users
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An alternative banker
Because it's all about stories and the way we tell them, Jay Graber likes to tell journalists that his favorite book as a child was Robin Hood. Another happy coincidence of storytelling, his official first name in civil status, Lantian, means “blue sky” (blue sky) in Mandarin, his mother's native language. It contains, she explained in 2023 to the magazine Forbes, the promise of access to “freedom without limits” and to “opportunities that had been denied to [s]a mother in her youth. Years later, while studying at the University of Pennsylvania, the young woman discovered the existence of bitcoin during an internship in China. Marked as a teenager by the Occupy Wall Street movement and the desire to emancipate herself from banking institutions, she created, thanks to a grant of 1,000 dollars (947 euros), a « banque » which allows the exchange of services, without having to resort to currency.
A well-inspired recruit
Jay Graber's mother, an acupuncturist, grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, before fleeing her country in the 1980s. His father is a mathematics professor. Latian Jay Graber was born in Tulsa (Oklahoma), in 1991. In the summer of 2021, when Parag Agrawal, who replaced founder Jack Dorsey at the head of Twitter, asked her to take the reins of Bluesky, she accepted condition: that the new structure is completely independent from its parent company. A keen expert in the world of tech, her intuition is correct. In October 2022, when Elon Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars (42 billion euros), he relieved the platform of 80% of its employees, renamed it X and began a transformation which today made it a powerful ideological organ at the service of ultraconservatives from all countries rallied to Donald Trump.
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