CorpDigest
Roblox Corporation
Leadership History
3 leaders · Full leadership timeline
Last reviewed: 2025-07-15 · By Swet Parvadiya
Roblox is not a gaming company. It operates a sovereign digital economy with its own currency, its own monetary policy, and its own labor market — one where 40 million independent creators build the products that 97.8 million daily active users consume for an average of 2.4 hours per day. The company's $4.124 billion in FY2024 bookings flow almost entirely through Robux, a closed-loop fiat currency that users purchase with real money and spend within the platform. The economics of a central bank, not a game developer. The Robux system creates accounting complexity that standard revenue metrics do not capture. Users buy Robux with cash; Roblox defers that revenue recognition over an estimated two-year useful life, creating a $1.2 billion deferred revenue balance at the end of FY2024. Creators earn Robux from users and can cash them out through the Developer Exchange program — but only after earning a minimum of 100,000 Robux (equivalent to $350) and only at a fixed rate of $0.0035 per Robux. The company distributed $741 million to developers in 2024 while retaining $3.604 billion in recognized GAAP revenue. The 2,100-employee organization in San Mateo, California builds infrastructure: physics engines, rendering systems, matchmaking algorithms, and the economic mechanisms that govern 40 million independent development teams. It does not build games. The 29 percent year-over-year user growth, the 2.4-hour daily engagement time, and the $4.124 billion in bookings all flow from creator labor that Roblox compensates at $0.0035 per Robux — a rate that has sparked recurring controversy about whether the platform's economics adequately reward the people generating its value. Revenue grew from $2.799 billion in 2023 to $3.604 billion in 2024 to projected $4.5 billion in 2025. The net loss of $1.15 billion in 2024 reflects the cost structure of running an operation at this scale: 24 percent of bookings to app stores, 18 percent to developer exchange, 12 percent to trust and safety, 13 percent to infrastructure. Those four line items alone consume 67 percent of gross bookings before a single employee salary is paid.
Co-Founder and CEO
Baszucki has directed the company's long-term vision, overseeing the transition from a PC-based physics sandbox to a global mobile-first digital economy, and led the company through its $29.5 billion direct listing in 2021.
Chief Financial Officer
Guthrie manages the company's financial strategy, overseeing the $4.124 billion in FY2024 bookings and guiding the company's capital allocation toward infrastructure and trust and safety investments while steering toward adjusted EBITDA profitability.
Chief Science and Technology Officer
Sturman leads the engineering and product development teams, driving the development of the new rendering engine, spatial voice chat, and the generative AI tools that are modernizing the Roblox Studio experience.
David Baszucki has served as the sole CEO of Roblox Corporation from its founding in 2004 through the present, a tenure exceeding two decades. He has never shared the title or stepped aside, which makes him one of the longest-tenured founder-CEOs in interactive entertainment. The continuity is structurally protected by the company's dual-class share structure, which gives Baszucki holdings of Class B shares with twenty votes per share compared with one vote per share for the Class A common stock that trades publicly. As of the most recent proxy, Baszucki controlled roughly 65 to 70 percent of the total voting power despite owning a much smaller economic stake. The voting structure shields him from activist intervention and from pressure to install a professional manager in response to share-price drawdowns. The leadership team beneath him has rotated; the company appointed Manuel Bronstein as Chief Product Officer in 2022 from a Google background, and the CFO role has been held by Mike Guthrie since 2018. Baszucki's continued tenure has been a stabilizing factor through the 2022 share-price decline, the 2023 Hindenburg short report, and the platform's ongoing safety controversies.
Roblox went public with a dual-class share structure that grants founder David Baszucki, his trusts, and affiliated entities Class B common stock carrying twenty votes per share. The publicly traded Class A common stock carries one vote per share. The structure was put in place at the 2021 direct listing and was disclosed in the company's S-1 filing. As of the most recent proxy filings, Baszucki and his trusts hold a percentage of total voting power between 65 and 70 percent, while owning a much smaller share of the total economic equity (typically reported in the 8 to 12 percent range). The structure means that Baszucki can independently approve director slates, executive compensation, large acquisitions, and changes to the certificate of incorporation. There is no sunset provision tied to a specific date, although the Class B shares generally convert to Class A upon transfer outside the founder's trusts. Investors who have criticized the structure include institutional governance advisers such as ISS and Glass Lewis, who have flagged the perpetual voting control. The structure is similar to those used by Meta, Alphabet, and Snap, and is consistent with the founder-led governance norms of US technology platforms.
David Baszucki has been the principal public spokesperson for Roblox's response to child safety concerns, appearing on earnings calls, in major media interviews, and at investor conferences to defend the company's moderation practices and to commit to ongoing investment. Under his leadership the company has invested in tens of thousands of human moderators (largely outsourced to specialized firms), in AI-driven moderation of uploaded models, in age estimation and verification systems, and in restricted social features for accounts under 13. Baszucki has acknowledged that the platform has had incidents but has consistently argued that Roblox's openness to creators is the core of its value and that the safety challenge is one the company manages rather than eliminates. In response to short-seller reports in 2024 alleging systemic safety failures, Baszucki and CFO Mike Guthrie issued public rebuttals, accelerated the rollout of age estimation, and increased disclosure of safety metrics. The 2024 Hindenburg report led to a brief share-price decline followed by recovery as the company published Trust and Safety transparency data. Baszucki has personally signed off on major safety policy changes, including the November 2024 restriction on direct messaging for users under 13.
David Baszucki's compensation as CEO of Roblox is unusual for a public company of its size because the founder has accepted a $1 base salary for several years and has not received traditional annual equity grants. According to Roblox's proxy filings, Baszucki's reported total compensation has typically been below $3 million per year, consisting primarily of perquisites including personal security, with a $1 salary and minimal equity. The compensation profile reflects Baszucki's existing equity stake, which is large enough that further annual grants would be neither material to his net worth nor reasonable from a dilution perspective. Other named executive officers at Roblox, including CFO Mike Guthrie and Chief Technology Officer Daniel Sturman, receive more conventional cash and equity packages valued in the range of $10 to $25 million per year, largely in stock-based compensation. The structural decision to keep founder cash compensation at $1 is common among technology founders with very large equity stakes including Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, Larry Ellison at Oracle, and the Google founders prior to their step-back. It limits one source of governance friction even while the dual-class voting structure preserves Baszucki's control.