If Bluesky’s social media dreams don’t pan out, the company has a solid backup business to pursue. The decentralized network is making a killing from selling T-shirts with a subtle Latin dig at Mark Zuckerberg—a message that is very much in line with Bluesky’s goals of differentiating itself as a billionaire-adverse alternative to the likes of Meta and Elon Musk’s X.
The oversized tees are carbon copies of a shirt donned by Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, earlier this month at SXSW in Austin. Adorned with the Latin phrase “mundus sin Caesaribus,” which translates to “a world without Caesars,” they display the same font and coloring as another top worn by Zuckerberg during Meta Connect in September last year.
The Meta CEO’s shirt read “aut Zuck aut nihil” or “either Zuck or nothing,” a twist on the saying “either Caesar or nothing.” Zuckerberg has long been fascinated by Roman emperors and has a particular interest in Augustus Caesar, who he praised as having established 200 years of world peace through “a really harsh approach” in a 2018 New Yorker profile. His passion for Ancient Rome even extends to the names of his three daughters, Maxima, August and Aurelia, who all have Latin monikers.
Graber’s diss at the Meta head evidently resonated amongst Bluesky users. After the company released a batch of the tees for sale on March 13, they sold out in a mere 30 minutes. Bluesky brought back the shirts earlier this week, with sizes S to XXL available for a limited seven-day period.
Priced at $40, the proceeds will benefit the open network Bluesky is built upon, said the company. Those who don’t want to shell out for the tees, however, can also buy copies that have popped up across retailers like Etsy (ETSY), Walmart (WMT) and eBay (EBAY).
How does Bluesky make money?
Within the first day of its restock on March 18, Bluesky “had more money coming in today than we did the last two years selling custom domains,” according to a post from Rose Wang, the company’s chief operating officer. “That’s it. Pivoting to a T-shirt company,” joked Wang.
While Bluesky has so far managed to avoid running ads, the company’s business model does include providing services like custom domains—in 2023, it began offering users the opportunity to easily set unique domain names that can be linked to their Bluesky accounts. The nascent platform, which was initially incubated by Twitter in 2019 before launching as an independent company, is also currently exploring a subscription model.
Bluesky has grown rapidly in recent months, amassing more than 32 million users in part due to backlash against billionaire-owned platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter, which was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022 for $44 billion. Bluesky claims that its open-source structure will supposedly protect it from similar takeovers, as users can leave the platform with their data or create a new network if they’re unhappy with its direction.
“If a billionaire came in and bought Bluesky and took it over, or I decided tomorrow to change things in a way that people really didn’t like, then they could fork off and go on to other applications,” said Graber while speaking at SXSW on March 10. “The fact that users have that choice means we’re incentivized to keep serving [them].”
