Month: November 2025

• Jay Graber studied how technology interacts with society at the University of Pennsylvania.
• Bluesky’s open protocol offers a decentralized alternative to X and Meta platforms.
• Here is a look at Graber’s career and her unconventional path to Silicon Valley.

Jay Graber is the engineer behind one of the most ambitious experiments in reimagining social media.

The Tulsa-born CEO is best known for steering Bluesky, the decentralized platform she describes as a “billionaire-proof” alternative to X and Meta-owned platforms.

Graber’s emergence as a Silicon Valley power player was unconventional. In 2021, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tapped her to lead the Bluesky project, which was spun off as an independent public benefit company, just before Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

Since then, Bluesky’s user base has grown to over 40 million as of November 2025, powered by its open protocol, customizable moderation system, and promise of a more democratic digital ecosystem.

Here’s a look at Graber’s career timeline, from her early work in cryptocurrency to her rise as the architect of a new, user-owned social media platform:

Early life

Jay Graber was born Lantian Graber in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a mother who is an immigrant from China during the Cultural Revolution and a father of Swiss descent. Her mother, who is an acupuncturist, named Graber “Lantian”, which means “blue sky” in Chinese, as a wish that she would have “boundless freedom.” She was aptly named for the job she would eventually be given.

Her father is a mathematics teacher, and in a 2024 profile of Graber in Cosmico, he is cited as a source of intellectual and academic influence for Graber.

Education

At the University of Pennsylvania, Graber studied Science, Technology & Society, which is an interdisciplinary program that examines how technological innovation intersects with culture, politics, and ethics.

Rather than focusing solely on coding or engineering, the program allowed Graber to explore the broader systems that shape how technology is developed and utilized, an approach that later influenced her views on social networks and digital governance.

Some of her key guiding views include a decentralized internet and open source social media protocols. “We believe that the protocol is the fundamental guarantee on freedom of speech,” Graber said once during an interview with Fast Company.

Before Bluesky

Graber’s early career unfolded during the first wave of blockchain innovation in the mid-2010s. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she began her career as a software engineer at SkuChain, a startup focused on utilizing blockchain for supply-chain management. Around the same time, she also built and soldered bitcoin-mining rigs, deepening her technical grasp of decentralized systems beyond software.

Between 2016 and 2018, Graber joined the privacy-focused cryptocurrency project Zcash as a junior developer, contributing to one of the most advanced implementations of zero-knowledge proofs. Later, in 2019, she founded Happening, Inc., an events app that aimed to help communities organize and connect through shared experiences.

Happening, Inc. never really took off, but these early roles grounded Graber in both the engineering and ideological foundations of decentralized technology, which later shaped the vision for Bluesky as an open, user-controlled social network.

Joining Bluesky

When Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Twitter, first announced Bluesky in late 2019, it was a small, Twitter-funded initiative tasked with researching an open and decentralized standard for social media.

By August 2021, Dorsey decided to onboard Graber, who was then known in crypto circles for her work on Zcash and decentralized community tools, to lead and accelerate the effort. However, according to an April 2025 profile of Graber in the New Yorker, she quickly realized that for Bluesky to fulfill its mission, it needs to create a social protocol separate from any single corporation and maintain independence from Twitter.

With Dorsey’s backing, Graber negotiated a formal spin-out by October 2021 and incorporated Bluesky as a public benefit corporation, a legal structure that allowed it to prioritize user benefits and open standards over shareholder profit.

Twitter provided an initial $13 million in funding to give the new entity “freedom and independence to get started,” as Dorsey publicly described at the time.

Bluesky’s rise

Graber’s early move to separate Bluesky from Twitter may have saved it.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and renamed the platform X, Bluesky’s independence allowed it to thrive and emerge as a competitor to X as droves of users left the platform.

In September 2023, Bluesky only had around 1 million registered users, but this figure climbed to more than 20 million by the end of November 2024. The meteoric rise came after a user surge in Brazil after X was temporarily restricted there, as well as 1.25 million user gains the week after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election.

As of November 2025, Bluesky has around 40 million registered users. That is no match for X’s roughly 560 million users, but it provided an alternative for those dissatisfied with X’s ownership and content moderation.

Calling out Big Tech

Graber has taken a subtle dig at Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

During SXSW in Austin in March 2025, Graber wore a black T-shirt that reads “Mundus sine caesaribus,” meaning “a world without Caesars.” The design and font are widely interpreted as a response to Zuckerberg’s own Latin slogan shirt, which reads “Aut Zuck aut nihil,” meaning “either Zuck or nothing.”

The shirt drew public curiosity, and Bluesky began selling the same shirt. A spokesperson for the company told Business Insider at the time that the shirts sold out in 30 minutes, representing the company’s “democratic approach, where no single CEO or company controls your experience online.”

A modest net worth

Compared to other Silicon Valley CEOs who run major social media platforms, all of whom are billionaires, Graber has a very modest net worth.

Estimates of Graber’s net worth fall between $2.95 million and $5 million, mostly depending on her equity in Bluesky. Since Bluesky is not a publicly traded company, Graber’s stake in the company and her annual compensation are not publicly disclosed.

As of early 2025, Bluesky’s valuation is estimated to be around $700 million.

A ‘billionaire-proof’ platform

Graber positions Bluesky as a new kind of social network.

Bluesky is built on an open-source Authenticated Transfer Protocol, which decentralizes social networking and hands more control to users rather than a single company or executive.

“The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source,” Graber told CNBC in an interview in November 2024.

“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,” Graber added, referring to Musk’s purchase of the platform that is now named X.

Unlike traditional social platforms like X or Facebook, Bluesky is built on an open-source ecosystem called the ATmosphere, powered by the Authenticated Transfer Protocol. The system gives users the ability to design and customize their own ranking algorithms, carry their posts and followers with them across different apps, and avoid being subject to any platform’s arbitrary or politically driven moderation decisions.

Activism on Bluesky

Bluesky became a platform widely used by progressive activists and community organizers.

The Tesla Takedown movement, a pushback against Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s involvement with Donald Trump and the White House’s DOGE office, famously spread via Bluesky when actor Alex Winter contacted a sociologist in Boston to build a website where people could organize local protests.

But the progressiveness of Bluesky also seems to have spooked some politicians. Semafor’s media reporter Max Tani wrote in May 2025 that some congressional staffers told him that they gave up on using Bluesky as an alternative to X, because “their bosses kept getting yelled at by Democratic users angry at their impotence.”

Changing the ecosystem

Graber is unfazed by Bluesky’s slower growth in terms of registered and active users.

In an interview in May with Fast Company, Graber said that reports of Bluesky’s death are “greatly exaggerated” and that growth “comes in waves,” with new communities being established at each stage.

“We’re still seeing a lot of community formation, and one of the most exciting things is how structurally different this is,” said Graber. “It’s not just another social site that has to be a singular winner-take-all in an ecosystem with existing incumbents.”

In 2025, Bluesky still added around 10 million newly registered users.

A warning against AI over-reliance

Graber has tips on how to thrive in an era of AI, and reliance is not the answer.

“AI can handle many reasoning tasks, but if we fully outsource our thinking, it’s not good enough,” Graber told Business Insider.

She added that for students, that might mean writing essays by hand to “build the muscle for critical thinking.”

At Bluesky, Graber said AI is used for moderation and curation but never runs on its own, because while AI delivers packaged expertise, human value lies in judgment and adaptability.

For job seekers, Graber encourages workers to adopt a generalist mindset and master core skills such as writing and coding.

“If you don’t know what good code looks like,” she said, “you won’t be able to evaluate AI’s output.”

• Netflix’s ‘Marines’ explores US Marines in Japan preparing for uncertain Pacific conflict.
• The series highlights the daily reality and stress of military deployment training.
• ‘Marines’ offers insight into modern military life amid US-China tensions in the Pacific region.

A new Netflix mini-docuseries released this month turns its lens on an unusual part of military life: not the heat of battle, but the long, grinding calm that can precede it.

The series “Marines” follows a handful of service members with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, a roughly 2,000-member Marine contingent that deploys aboard a trio of Navy ships, floating sea bases that can be rapidly moved into global hotspots. The 31st MEU is based in Japan, home to one of the Corps’ three major bases, with others in California and North Carolina.

Marines go through intense training in preparation for such deployments, certifying for missions ranging from disaster response to amphibious assaults. The Netflix show centers on the planning behind a large-scale beach landing, a classic Marine Corps mission. If the exercise fails, the entire unit could lose its deployment certification.

Unlike most military-themed television, “Marines” focuses on the tension of preparation rather than combat itself in four 45-minute episodes. Executive producer Sebastian Junger, a well-known wartime journalist who focuses on the human costs of war, told Business Insider that he hopes to show viewers the unromanticized — and stressful — reality of a force that spends years preparing for a war that may never happen.

“When people sign up for the military, they’re thinking, ‘I will prove myself to myself, that I’m worthy, that I’m courageous, that I’m brave, that I’m strong,'” he said. “But in order to do that, you have to kind of want to wind up in combat.”

Yet combat, especially the kind that the US could face in the Pacific, home to near-peer rival China, could be devastating. Junger said he also hopes his series serves as a way for Americans to think critically about the human cost behind any future conflict.

“I think the American public would be absolutely shocked at the price tag of a full-scale war,” he said. The cost in lives in Ukraine has been catastrophic. A war in the Pacific could be worse.

The new series is a narrow but revealing lens into the urgency many troops in the Pacific feel, and traces the experiences of a group of real Marines as they train their teams for deployment: a senior enlisted infantry Marine and his officer, a pilot still mastering his flight skills, and a naval officer balancing command duties with the guilt familiar to many working mothers. There’s also a pair of lifelong best friends serving as a machine gun team.

All of them are navigating the struggle of belonging to a generation of Marines with little or no combat experience. Most hardened veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have cycled out of service, leaving mostly younger troops who sometimes yearn for the kind of battlefield tests they’ve only heard about.

For many Marines in the post-Global War on Terror era, deployments, the opportunities for which are often highly coveted, are often limited to the maritime MEU deployments. It’s not combat, but it’s not without its hardships.

“Life on the ship is tough,” said director Chelsea Yarnell of Marines’ experiences aboard Navy warships. “The living conditions on the ships are really severe, like extremely close quarters,” she said. “No creature comforts, plumbing didn’t always work. If you forgot your shower shoes, you would live to regret it.”

All of the training seen in the series unfolds against a backdrop of rising geopolitical tensions. Stationed in Japan, the Marines and sailors of the 31st MEU sail with the Navy on the front lines of uneasy American tensions with China, a palpable dynamic throughout the show. At various points, a Chinese spy vessel appears to be shadowing the Navy ships carrying the MEU.

Not everyone in the series is shown storming beaches or flying aircraft. Much of “Marines” dwells on the ‘staff officer’ side of military life, the meticulous, painstaking planning that underpins every operation. It’s the modern version of watching old-timey generals moving battlefield figurines around a map of Europe, but now, it’s all done with PowerPoint, caffeine, and untold logistics and administrative checks.

It’s less gripping compared to firefights. But that’s the point, the director said.

“I think that what I was expecting was a story of physical toughness,” Yarnell said of the production process. But it was the psychological toll of that laborious planning and preparation, especially aboard a ship, that proved most compelling.

Junger hopes the series helps correct long-standing misconceptions about military service that have persisted since the end of the draft in the 1970s. Most troops now don’t run around carrying guns and slinging rounds downrange all day, he said. In reality, the majority of service members work in roles like logistics, intelligence, and planning, essential but often unseen jobs that sustain those storming the beach.

Troops are often portrayed in Hollywood films as either heroes on a pedestal or invading villains, Junger said. And often, the military falls victim to its own exclusive culture, pushing jargon and cultural norms that few outsiders fully understand, Yarnell said.

What’s frequently lost is a deeper reckoning with what’s asked of individuals trained to kill and die on behalf of the nation. That question feels newly urgent as the US and China continue to challenge one another in the Pacific.

“These are your sons and daughters,” Junger said when asked what viewers might take away from the documentary. “Whether we ever go to war or not, every American I think should understand the nature of our military, in not just political terms but human terms.”

• Lisa La Valle, 64, moved to Paris in 2018 seeking a fresh start after separating from her husband.
• Paris didn’t meet her expectations, and in 2021, she moved to Brescia, Italy.
• Moving to a new country has its highs and lows, but La Valle said she doesn’t regret her choice.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lisa La Valle, 64, who moved from New Jersey to Paris in 2018 and now lives in Brescia, Italy. La Valle retired in 2023, but still works part-time as an English teacher and is an author who writes about culture and the expat experience. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I lived abroad for the first time at 24. I did my final university semester in Athens, Greece, and I loved it so much that I said, “I’m just going to stay” — and I did, for two years.

I eventually moved back to the US and settled in New Jersey. I got married, had kids, started a career as an expat career coach, and spent many years working and traveling around the world.

My ex-husband and I always dreamed of moving to Europe once our children were older.

When we divorced, I looked ahead at the rest of my life and thought, “I’ll be damned if I spend the next 30 years in New Jersey.” I didn’t want to worry about affording healthcare or staying in the rat race to keep up with the high cost of living. So, in 2018, at the age of 57, I kept the dream alive and purchased a one-way ticket to Paris.

I have lived in Europe for eight years, first in Paris and now in Italy. Moving to a new country is always an adventure, but there’s a difference between doing it at 24 and at 57.

In my 20s, I immersed myself in Greek culture rather than being “me.” Now I’m more fully formed as a woman; I came to Europe to breathe, to find myself, and to see whether I could do it.

Paris wasn’t what I’d hoped for

There’s a phenomenon called Paris Syndrome: a shock that hits when your Paris bubble, the fantasy of what the city should be like, pops. It happened to me.

When I first moved to Paris in 2018, I sometimes had to pinch myself. I remember crossing the statues on Pont Neuf and crying at the beauty. But after nine months, the rose-colored glasses came off.

Some places are great at exporting a brand — the American dream, the romantic Parisian dream — but it doesn’t always reflect reality.

I eventually realized that life and the people in France are just like everywhere else. The glamorized version seen on Netflix’s Emily in Paris couldn’t be further from the truth — and no, not everyone looks like Jane Birkin.

What wore me down most about living in France was the cynicism. In many ways, Paris felt like a private club, and I was not invited.

Forming friendships in a new country can be a challenging experience. Although I’m willing to befriend anyone, I know not everyone is, and being an expat can be an extraordinarily isolating and lonely experience for some people.

I lived in Paris for four years, and overall, I had a good life. I made some close friends and enjoyed teaching English at several schools, including the International School of Paris. But still, I never got the feeling that it was where I wanted to stay forever.

I feel at home in Italy

I moved to Italy in 2021 after accepting a job teaching English literature at an international high school. This was before I took early retirement; I was still working about 20 hours a week and earning about $1,500 a month.

I think it’s much easier to move to a new place when you have a job lined up. You have a financial safety net, a social network, and sometimes even a place to live. That security turns the risk into a calculated one.

I am a third-generation Italian. My ancestors left Italy in search of a better life in the United States. Ironically, a century later, I became a reverse immigrant.

I live in Brescia, in the North between Milan and Verona. There isn’t the chaos of the touristy South, and, beyond the Old City, it is distinctly modern — more like a Northern European city than the Italian cliché.

After experiencing the “Hollywood version” of Europe, with its cobblestone streets and lantern-lit homes, I’m grateful to live in a modern, fully refurbished apartment in Brescia.

I have a big living room with terracotta tiles, a kitchen, a full bathroom, a wide hallway with floor-to-ceiling windows, a large bedroom, and a terrace. It feels like a hotel, but I pay only €550 ($636.60) a month in rent.

In Paris, my rent was $1,200 a month. I really had to work my ass off; it’s one of the reasons I left there. Here in Brescia, I’m saving money, and I also feel welcomed, whereas in Paris, I used to be filled with anxiety.

‘I feel as if my DNA has been rearranged’

Everyone knows about the American Dream: get married, have kids, build a career. I think a lot of people in the United States are waking up to the reality that it isn’t working anymore, or it doesn’t exist the way it did for their parents. That’s why we’re seeing people with the means to move abroad actually do it.

I’m all for following your dreams, but brace yourself — it’s not always easy moving to a new country. In many ways, it might not live up to your expectations.

While Europe has given me the quality of life I envisioned — the transportation is excellent, the healthcare system is solid, the food is fresh, and people are polite — I’m living in a different Europe than the one I experienced in Athens in 1984. It’s taken some time to adjust.

Still, I feel like I have a great life. I’m retired now and have been receiving Social Security for the past two years, so I work part-time. I don’t make a lot, but the lower cost of living makes life much easier. I don’t feel like I have to struggle financially, like I would have had to in the US.

I feel as if my DNA has been rearranged. I definitely wish I had moved sooner, but I had obligations — now, not so much.

When I go back to the US, it’s like slipping into an old shoe, but I don’t feel nostalgic or as if I’m missing out. I don’t wonder, “Did I make the right decision?” If anything, the visit reaffirms that I did.

• Meena Lakdawala-Flynn began competitive gymnastics at age two and said she wanted to compete in the Olympics.
• The grit, work ethic, and competitive drive she learned from the sport helped her succeed at Goldman Sachs.
• Athletes are a key recruiting pool for Goldman, and sports experience can differentiate applicants.

Meena Lakdawala-Flynn knew what it meant to perform under pressure years before becoming a partner at one of the country’s top banks.

Lakdawala-Flynn, cohead of Global Private Wealth Management and One Goldman Sachs, started doing gymnastics when she was two years old. By the time she was eight, Lakdawala-Flynn said she was exercising between 30 and 40 hours a week, and dead-set on going to the Olympics.

Yet even though Olympic glory wasn’t in Lakdawala-Flynn’s future — “I grew four inches, I put on 20 pounds, and I wasn’t good enough,” she told Business Insider — the years in the gym still echo in her work on Wall Street.

“The moment I stepped foot on that trading floor, the same competitive juices that I had in gymnastics came out in something else,” she said of her first finance internship at an investment boutique. In her years rising at Goldman, Lakdawala-Flynn said she has relied on the work ethic, grit, perseverance, and need to perform that she mastered during her time as a gymnast. Even though gymnastics is an individual sport, competing on a team in college influenced her ability to form key relationships at Goldman.

“Gymnastics is won in millimeter-level details under pressure, so is working in finance,” Lakdawala-Flynn told Business Insider in an email. She said the same is true of her job: the small, precise changes she makes to models, risk assessments, and client meetings can lead to big advantages.

Athletes have become an important talent and recruiting pool for Goldman Sachs, which hired a former NFL star in 2018 and promoted him to managing director in 2022. Business Insider previously spoke to three former D-1 college athletes who work at Goldman about how their experiences have helped them stand out and get ahead.

“It is a way to differentiate yourself,” Jacqueline Arthur, Goldman’s head of human capital management, previously told Business Insider about why athletes are compelling applicants. “These qualities are not just transferable but powerful and directly applicable to the dynamic environment of financial services.”

Those qualities don’t just have to come from sports, though.

Lakdawala-Flynn said that being seriously devoted to any craft can teach the same teamwork and dedication common among many successful people.

“If you have that amount of passion, curiosity, and dedication, and you rise to become one of the best, it’s the same skill sets, whether it’s an athlete or not an athlete,” she said.

Landing a job at Goldman isn’t easy, especially for Gen Zers who are trying to differentiate themselves in a challenging job market. The firm received more than 360,000 applications for its 2025 summer internship program, and accepted less than 1% of hopefuls.

Work at Goldman or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at atecotzky@insider.com or Signal at alicetecotzky.05. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.