Who Is the CEO of Discord.

The CEO of Discord is Humam Sakhnini, a games industry executive who took over from co-founder Jason Citron on 28 April 2025 and is still named as chief executive on Discord’s own company page.

Anyone searching for the Discord CEO usually wants the name and the background. The more useful question for brands is what kind of leader Discord chose, because it says a lot about where the platform is heading. Of the people who run the platforms brands build communities on, Sakhnini came from running games businesses, not from building a social product.

Who Humam Sakhnini is

Discord’s announcement describes Sakhnini as having more than 15 years of experience in the gaming industry. Most recently he was Vice Chairman of Activision Blizzard, overseeing a portfolio that includes Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush.

Before that he was President of King, the maker of Candy Crush. Discord says he succeeded King’s founding CEO and led the company to record performance after Activision Blizzard bought it.

Discord’s company page adds that, as Activision Blizzard’s Chief Strategy and Talent Officer, he led the acquisition of King. His career, in short, is running and growing large games businesses that someone else founded.

How the handover happened

Discord announced the change on 23 April 2025, with Sakhnini starting as CEO on Monday 28 April and joining the Board of Directors.

Jason Citron, who co-founded Discord and had been CEO since the start, stayed on the Board and became Advisor to the CEO. Stanislav Vishnevskiy, the other co-founder, continued as Chief Technology Officer.

Citron’s note to staff, published on Discord’s blog the same day, put the decision plainly. Looking at what Discord would need from its CEO over the next few years, he wrote that it was time for him to “hire myself out of a job”.

Why an operator and not a founder

The language Discord used is worth reading closely. Citron called handing over to Sakhnini “the right evolution for Discord’s future”. Board member Mitch Lasky described Sakhnini as “the ideal leader for this new phase of Discord’s history”.

Citron’s note also said the new CEO would lead Discord through its next chapter of growth “and someday becoming a public company”.

Our reading is simple. Founders are hired by nobody: they build the thing. A board brings in someone who has scaled a business someone else built when the job becomes running a large company well. Sakhnini’s track record at King, taking over from its founders and leading it to record performance after Activision Blizzard bought it, matches that job closely.

The business he took over

When Sakhnini was appointed, Discord said it served more than 200 million monthly active users, meaning people who used it at least once in a month.

It also said that in 2024 it had refocused on gaming, and was pursuing advertising, micro-transactions and social infrastructure for game developers. Discord added that its adjusted EBITDA, a measure of profit that leaves out some costs, had been positive for the past five quarters.

That is a business that had already started turning a large, engaged audience into revenue, and wanted someone to keep it going.

How Discord describes itself now

Discord’s company page today lists Sakhnini under “OUR CEO” and says he became chief executive in April 2025. It describes him as having spent more than 15 years leading some of the largest businesses in gaming.

The same page gives a daily figure rather than a monthly one: more than 90 million daily active users, from Discord’s internal data as of the fourth quarter of 2025. It also says more than 90% of its users play video games, based on its 2025 user survey.

The two user numbers measure different things, so they do not contradict each other. A monthly figure counts anyone who turned up at least once in a month. A daily figure counts the people who use it on a given day, so it is always the smaller of the two.

What brands running servers should expect

None of this means Discord is changing its product overnight. But a games operator at the top, a stated push into advertising and micro-transactions, and the stated aim of someday becoming a public company all point the same way, in our view.

We would expect Discord to behave more like a large commercial platform over time: more structured, more focused on revenue, and more deliberate about what it builds for gaming. For brands that run servers, that is a reason to treat Discord as a channel with its own rules and priorities, not a free chat room that will stay the same.

In practice, that means three habits:

• Run your server on a plan, with clear roles, moderation rules and a regular rhythm of posts and events.
• Own the relationship, so members know where else to find you if a feature they rely on changes.
• Review how the server is performing on a set schedule, rather than only when something breaks.

If you are still building the audience, our guide on how to get your Discord server on Server Discovery covers the organic route in.

How NBK thinks about Discord

We treat Discord the way we treat every platform: as part of a system, not a side project. Community only compounds when someone owns it, there is a cadence behind it, and the team knows what good looks like each week.

That is the kind of setup our social media management work is built around, whether a brand is running one server or several channels at once.

Leadership changes are one of the clearest signals of where a platform is going. We look at the others in profiles like who is the CEO of TikTok.

Next step

If your community feels busy but not effective, start with an NBK audit and find out what the system behind it is missing.