> “And the biggest news: I won't be able to make the ELT tomorrow,” Matt wrote in an Announcement Slack. He continued, writing that Mark Davies, current Automattic Chief Financial Officer, has “conspired” with Automattic Board of Directors members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.”<p>If you’re doing this type of accusation in the company wide announcements channel, odds are you’re never coming back. A board coup rarely happens without a good reason, but a “leave of absence” isn’t a firing. It’s still pretty bad, but it’s not a firing. However, crashing out and waging war on the board <i>will</i> lead to that outcome.
In recent memory of companies I've worked for, even the absolute WORST executives haven't gotten fired. They always announce that "it's time for another adventure" or "I am taking a break". So I am not shocked they didn't fire him, although the board is now probably wishing they did.
Had a President make a big ordeal about leaving "for health reasons". His LinkedIn had him at a new company within a couple months doing the same thing.<p>Had a CISO leave for "personal" reasons. Talked to him a couple years later and yeah, he was fired.<p>Steal 20$ out of a cash register and make the local news. Waste a billion dollars at a corp and make insane decisions and ride out on a golden parachute. Its a fucked up world.
In fairness, I don't think stealing $20 makes the local news these days, unless you live in a town of 300 people. There's a lot of antisocial behavior that goes unreported.<p>But moreover: I guess there's a presumption, whether fair or not, that well-paid executives overseen by wealthy boards of directors are pre-vetted and act in good faith, whether or not those actions pan out and make money; versus robbery or violent crime that people recoil from, that assumption of good faith isn't there, because it's self-evident to ordinary people that there is no justification for such actions.
So you would prefer a media circus and investor scrutiny when your employer's executives are fired for failures or misconduct? This is likely to cause the price of the shares to drop, including any ESPP and stock grants you and your coworkers have vested. Is the satisfaction of seeing an executive dragged through the mud worth losing a chunk of your net worth to you, no matter how much the exec deserves it? I'd rather keep the money, personally.
Maybe if there were consequences, there wouldn't be so much corruption that leads to these silent firings.
Satisfaction? It’s about truth and justice, investors deserve to know about executive malfeasance
> So you would prefer a media circus and investor scrutiny when your employer's executives are fired for failures or misconduct?<p>Yes, as a warning to the other executives.<p>Signed,<p>The Shareholders
Yes, I’d prefer that investors know that the new executive is not going to continue the same crap and same level of poor judgement. Want them to know the replacement is looking to do more than wear a golden parachute.<p>Imagine if investors actually thought the personnel change was a positive one…
"Someone! Think of the shareholders!"
> Is the satisfaction of seeing an executive dragged through the mud worth losing a chunk of your net worth to you, no matter how much the exec deserves it?<p>Yes. There is far too little truth and justice in this world, <i>most especially</i> for corporate executives.<p>> I'd rather keep the money, personally.<p>Of course, me too buddy, me too. But some things are more important, don't you think? It would be a much much better world if the wealthy and powerful had to think carefully before acting. Think carefully before that action of misconduct. Bear the responsibility for their actions. Be afraid of the consequences.
> Steal 20$ out of a cash register and make the local news. Waste a billion dollars at a corp and make insane decisions and ride out on a golden parachute. Its a fucked up world.<p>I think if we are just looking at the media:<p>Most journalists wouldn't consider some nobody stealing $20 to be newsworthy in itself.<p>Most corporate scandals receive extensive media coverage. Even a CEO who was merely incompetent instead of corrupt, is still likely to get some bad press.<p>Now, you are completely right that the non-media consequences are very different – significant chance of criminal record (although in many jurisdictions, there are mechanisms which first-time offenders on minor charges can use to escape getting one) vs a multi-million dollar severance payment.<p>The issue with "golden parachutes" – if someone's employment contract creates an entitlement to a severance payment (and in some jurisdictions employment law creates one even if the contract itself doesn't) – then you generally have to pay them unless you terminate for "misconduct" (often even "serious misconduct"). The problem with terminating for "misconduct", is it creates a big incentive for the terminated employee to sue to try to get the severance payment they'd otherwise receive, and the larger the payment, the bigger the motivation – which creates an expensive legal and PR headache. The PR issue is especially acute for senior executives–a junior employee suing over a severance dispute will get a lot less media coverage than a former CEO doing it. So, unless the conduct was extremely egregious, there is a strong incentive for the employer/board to just pay the severance out and make the legal and PR headache go away.
Ah, but they take the big risks, you see. Someone has to do it.
Barring truly bad behavior this is how executives get fired.
Firing a CEO makes your company look bad. Even if you are firing them, you don't say you're firing them.
Those phrases often imply that they were fired or asked to resign - although the deniability can be useful, which is why they’re so often used. As a recent example, Fidji Simo went on leave from her role at OpenAI several months before leaving. Although I don’t know for sure, I would suppose that she was essentially fired when she went on leave, and the subsequent success of Codex after she went on leave confirmed the decision to fire her. It’s possible that, if Codex hadn’t been a success, she might have been brought back, so putting her on leave was useful for optionality.
Like sama? (Hope I don't get dang'ed for being political, especially against a ycombi founder...)
Spend more time with my family :).
He is surely very evidently mentally ill.<p>This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for decades, as well as writing a big chunk of what was "early modern" WP. Before he came unglued.<p>The fact that he looked, sounded, talked the way he did, was involved, put his own money where his mouth is, and was press-available to the extent he was is a lot of why WordPress was ever taken seriously. Given the level of control he has, it was used pretty judiciously for the longest time.<p>I am of the opinion that his broad charge against WP Engine was valid; I think he handled it insanely.<p>But as I say, he has come unglued. I'd be surprised if he returns to the job. I wish him well as I think anyone who has made money because of WP should. Things have gone wrong but there was a long run of things going remarkably well.<p>I do think this was overdue, for everyone including Matt, even though he evidently cannot see it. I hope, but am not hopeful as it were, that he sees that this is a message from the world to change track. I would instead expect to see a bit of revenge.
> He is surely very evidently mentally ill.<p>I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful.<p>I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner. I suspect that many people, myself included, would struggle in similar situations.<p>Occasionally a person can find themselves in a place where quitting is the best option for everyone involved, but the person at the centre is so dug in that they don’t even consider the possibility.
> I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful.<p>There are, to me, <i>abundant</i> signs that he is severely burned out, dysregulated and irrational.<p>(In this statement, in other statements, in his actions that wilfully worsened his own case against WP Engine, in his blog posts etc.)<p>These are mental health issues. I have experienced many of them myself (I am indeed recovering from them now) and do not know what else you could possibly call them.<p>He is very evidently experiencing continuing poor mental health. I don't know why the board would say "leave of absence" if they were not <i>themselves</i> alluding to his health. He clearly needs a break from the thing he does for his own benefit.<p>I absolutely wish him well and hope he steps back and takes care of himself for a while; none of this is worth worse health.
I am saying this as someone who has had repeated and ongoing issues with WP Engine as a hosting platform: no, Matt Mullenweg was not even valid in his basic assumptions motivating his lawsuit against WP Engine. The idea that a <i>hosting platform</i> is leeching off the WordPress ecosystem is absurd, for two reasons:<p>1. WordPress is free and open source software, developed under reciprocal licensing (GPL). Hosting companies are neither legally nor morally obligated to contribute back to WordPress core. They are <i>already</i> a beneficial part of the ecosystem.<p>2. WP Engine <i>was</i> contributing back to the WordPress ecosystem, just not Matt Mullenweg's corner of it.<p>WordPress is a modular platform and plugin and theme developers are just as important to WordPress's continued success as core development is. WP Engine happens to own Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is basically WordPress's answer to the Drupal Fields API[0]. ACF is what lets you add arbitrary fields to WordPress's page edit screen without having to write a bunch of custom metabox hooks and forms. It was a huge timesaver before things moved to page builders[1] and it's still useful even if you're using a page builder.<p>[0] Formerly Content Construction Kit<p>[1] Full disclosure: I <i>hate</i> Gutenberg. It is <i>not</i> WordPress, it's a React development kit tumor shoved inside WordPress. Any other page builder would be preferable.
Who knows, maybe he can try and blackmail them too[0] to get his way. It's worked out great so far.<p>[0] <a href="https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt#102-wp-engine-files-suit-against-matt-and-automattic" rel="nofollow">https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt#102-wp-engine-fi...</a>
I'm surprised that founders still care about all that stuff. They already made tons of money, who cares. None of it means anything. Nothing is fair in this society.<p>They don't mind the system working unfairly in their favor; they only have an issue with it when it starts working against them. At that point, it's too late; you have no voice.
<i>> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.”</i><p>This line is so perfectly on the nose it could be in a McSweeney's article and yet here it is in reality. We are truly on the weirdest timeline.
Unfortunately, this is for the best. WordPress powers a large percentage of the internet, and I'm not sure what's going on with Matt (who I've always liked) but something turned the past few years.<p>He's been behind unforced error after unforced error as CEO, and I hope a break helps him gain some perspective (although I don't see him being brought back).<p>WordPress has been his life for 23 years. Doing the same thing for 23 years likely makes it difficult to have a proper perspective.
"Unfortunately" for whom? I'm pretty ok, even happy, with him out.
it just sucks to see someone who helped popularize something so many people care about change (at least publicly) for the worse.
Unfortunate this was the result of 23 years, not unfortunate it's happening.
The entire internet is breathing a sigh of relief
No reason given?
Any reason needed?!? We can all see what he’s done!
He got tired of WPEngine not contributing back to wordpress, so he made it his mission to try and get them to pitch in.
Didn't he start that campaign at a conference for WordPress developers funded by WP engine?
I don't have any insight into what they did or didn't contribute, but it seems their obligation was zero and their level was quite a bit higher than that.
He tried to extort them. Hosting providers have been selling Wordpress hosting for years without "giving back"<p>Does Wordpress "give back" to PHP and Linux?
WordPress is free software. Its users are under no obligation to contribute to its development, or to make financial "contributions" to Automattic.
Does WPEngine have any obligation to contribute back? How is WordPress licensed?
"<i>Unfortunately</i>"??
"Unfortunately", because Matt did a lot of good for the internet over the past two decades. WordCamp is (or was) really amazing, the community he built is really great, the Automattic Lounge was cool, he's donated millions of dollars to good causes, and WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet.
Automattic also bought Tumblr and Pocket Casts, publishing the code of the latter. I used to have a subscription just to support them.
Huh. I still remember back in the Gutenberg launch era and all the drama around it (2018) the internet saying he was the devil for profiting from WP.
> WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet.<p>Unfortunately.
He read the commit logs and understood much of what he read. That's deep understanding of the product. That alone puts him in the top few percent of CEOs.<p>IMO.
Yeah, it's unfortunate when anyone goes off the deep end.
He still contributed a lot to the world during the good times.
Wordpress enshittified in the mid-2010s. It wasn’t recent. So, I only agree off we resolve “past few years” to at least a decade.
> Doing the same thing for 23 years likely makes it difficult to have a proper perspective.<p>Preach.<p>Seems to twist perception that reality is a fractal when it's recursive and eventually exits (everything dies).<p>Explains religion, politics, and similar longtermism memes.
em-dash by Cloudflare looks interesting in terms of replacing Wordpress.<p>by garnering enough of an ecosystem to cause a migration will be the bigger challenge.<p>of course some people will say in the age of agents will people need to visit websites ;)
A CMS that can only run
on one hosting provider?
Am I looking at the right thing?<p><a href="https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash</a><p>> EmDash depends on Dynamic Workers to run secure sandboxed plugins. Dynamic Workers are currently only available on paid accounts. Upgrade your account (starting at $5/mo) or comment out the worker_loaders block of your wrangler.jsonc configuration file to disable plugins.<p>Seems like a pretty poor replacement for WordPress, which will run on pretty much whatever random system happens to be within eyesight.
I think it is easy to underestimate how big of a deal this is. Matt has a stranglehold on Automattic and Wordpress, it is not possible to remove his control over the ecosystem and he is volatile. Ousting him as CEO is almost certain to cause a major reaction from Matt, so, for Automattic to make this decision is a very big deal. The right decision for the long term but the hard decision. I expect we will see Matt try to punish Automattic’s board, it will get worse for Automattic before it gets better.<p>Here is Matt talking about his control: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150</a>
If he has 84% voting share, can't he just fire the board?
Firing the board is the least Matt-like option. He has absolute control and ownership over the WordPress project, I think it is more likely that he starts his own Automattic splinter company and removes Automattic from the WordPress project. I’d guess he is already filing incorporation docs for Antimatter Inc. or some other Matt themed name.
If he's lost the confidence of the board and does that, how much is his company worth?
If Mullenweg attempts to fire the board that just suspended him, he would be weaponizing proxy votes against the very investors who originally granted them. While founder proxies are often structured to be irrevocable, using them to purge the board would almost certainly trigger a massive legal battle, attempts by investors to breach or revoke the proxy agreements, and severe financial instability for the company.<p>While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board, executing that move would ignite a corporate civil war rather than a clean transition of power.
I'd definitely take away his access having seen how vindictive he has been throughout the WPE saga, for everyone's sake
Here is the whole saga until May 2025: <a href="https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7fc225d" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...</a>
Hey, that's me! Unfortunately that's only reasonably complete through mid-February of 2025; i had some health issues and was never able to catch back up.
<a href="https://mullenweg.wtf/" rel="nofollow">https://mullenweg.wtf/</a> picked up after that
I briefly worked in the web agency SaaS space and hoooo boy, I have never known a more gossipy or dramatic industry.<p>That’s not to pass comment either way on Mullenweg<p>It’s just WordPress folk are nuts.
Enforced by checkboxes on every login form, no doubt. Less sarcastically: I hope his corporate access is <i>thoroughly</i> controlled; we've seen him in 'full force', before.<p>Article says no change for .org... this will almost surely <i>become</i> interesting.
I am surprised it has taken the Automattic board so long, just don't understand that.
Quick, somebody back up the WP Plugins repository.
I'm shocked. I always thought that Matt held the majority of the voting shares, and that the board of directors was mostly there as a rubber stamp.
Voting shares and board of directors are two different mechanisms. Just because he holds 80%+ of voting shares, doesn't mean he can control who runs the company. Shareholders can make up (elect/remove) directors on the board, the board decides who can run the company (or other officials). His vote against was likely true, but if the board is 4 seats and he only has one vote, that's 25%.<p>A lot of this is pretty typical, but what's interesting is what happens next. He could just remove members of the board with his 80%+ control, and build a board that backs him. I assume they have investor agreements that prevent that.
Regardless of who he puts on the board, directors have legal obligations to the SEC and all shareholders. If he wants that level of control he would need to take the company private, and various investor agreements probably prevent this.
I’m a bit relieved. Only knowing it superficially through its larger public actions, Automattic used to be one of the “good guys” companies to me. I envisioned myself applying there at some point. This has obviously changed over the last 1-2 years.<p>I don’t doubt that the good parts were largely Matt’s work, but well ... I think a lot of us followed his semi-recent public actions.<p>I’m a bit surprised they didn’t pull the plug earlier given they could have. Hasn’t he already caused vast damage?<p>Still, he has done a lot of good for the internet and world at large. I don’t want to discount that. I just hope he manages to chill a bit.
I am so curious why now, what changed? The WPEngine saga was started two years ago.
>why now<p>from the bottom of the article: One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.” This year’s festival ended on September 7.<p>probably less about returning 'with ideas' and more about matt being out of contact for a couple week or so, leaving time to orchestrate this behind his back.
from my own observations:<p>a) you don't want the WPEngine case going to trial and that is coming to a decision point soon. chances are the new CEO and board settle.<p>b) wordpress is being absolutely obliterated by ai. work for commercial plugin authors and agencies has dried up while the platform and ecosystem see major security issues and worms exploit a large number of sites every week.<p>wordpress and automattic haven't responded to this well, at all. at times it is often straight denial.<p>founder CEO distracted by expensive lawsuit while facing existential threat to project that will require complete attention and a lot of skill to steer out of
It never ended.
Probably back room deal between Wordpress board/management and WPEngine board/management. It's a safe bet that WPEngine was destroying Wordpress legally simply because their CEO doesn't suffer from verbal diarrhea and actually shuts up when the lawyers tell him to.<p>If you get Matt out of the way, you can ink a deal and resolve everything so that even if Matt pulls something else, there are contracts in place that can't be gotten rid of so easily.
It's impressive this took so long.
Bypass paywall at either <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260909213058/https://www.404media.co/wordpress-automattic-ceo-matt-mullenweg-put-on-leave-of-absence/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260909213058/https://www.404me...</a> or <a href="https://archive.ph/7J5TB" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/7J5TB</a>.<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/tech/993022/wordpress-automattic-ceo-matt-mullenweg-leave-of-absence" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/tech/993022/wordpress-automattic-ce...</a> also has a writeup which takes some quotes from the article (and a statement by Automattic).
Finally
Reminds me of the first season of Succession
Finally.
This is likely how they pull out of the disasterous legal actions Mullenweg has taken.
Finally.
Good, get him the fuck away from Wordpress. Though frankly, a better solution might be for businesses to ask themselves whether or not they need Wordpress anymore.<p>In the mean time, if you're unable to derisk Mullenweg out of your business stack, this is a good first step.
WordPress dominance of the web has certainly peaked, but history indicates there will be several years in which to continue to extract comfortable profits while riding it down. e.g. Oracle, a database that almost no business has actually needed in decades.
I'm not convinced that sort of legacy lock in exists in the web space. It moves fast and its value is in the content. In the age of AI, migrating that data makes it trivial to move away from a risky platform. I cut my development teeth on WP and managed some fairly large sites. There are far more interesting and well developed alternatives out there.
The uptick in Webflow usage alone would suggest the damage has already been done.
>Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.”<p>What is wrong with these people?
I was curious what this meant, so I looked into it.<p>They asked Automatic.css to change their name: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1omrtrk/automattic_wants_a_popular_framework_called/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1omrtrk/automatt...</a><p>Automatic.css is a paid CSS framework specifically for WordPress.<p>Legally speaking I have no opinion here, but I don't think it's as out-of-pocket as it sounds.
The article linked ( <a href="https://www.404media.co/automattic-automatic-trademark-matt-mullenweg-kevin-geary/" rel="nofollow">https://www.404media.co/automattic-automatic-trademark-matt-...</a> ) is behind a paywall. But reading <a href="https://www.searchenginejournal.com/automattic-disputes-use-of-word-automatic-for-wordpress-product/560353/" rel="nofollow">https://www.searchenginejournal.com/automattic-disputes-use-...</a> it sounds like the claim 'Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic"' might not be accurate.
Yeah, regardless of other aspects of Automattic's behaviour, flagging that an identically-pronounced single letter variation of their registered company name might be a confusingly similar brand <i>for a third party commercial service specifically designed to customise Automattic's product</i> to adopt seems to be at the reasonable end of trademark disputes...
404 Media usually has fairly shoddy journalism. Take everything they say with a grain of salt.
Hard disagree. 404 has been awesome since being founded.
FUD. Don’t spread nonsense. They’re as rigorous as any other tech journo, you just have an axe to grind.
That's how you can tell the article isn't giving you the full picture.
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I guess when people vote the same way, it’s technically a conspiracy?
No, it's called "<i>voting</i>".
No, a conspiracy would require that they all got together in secret to plan to vote that way. Which is hardly necessary in a case like this.
OT - I recognized the name but don't know much about the personality. Evidently, judging from many comments here, there is one. I was frankly struck by the depth of the corduroy on that jacket. At first glance I thought it was pinstripes but in profile it is obviously corduroy. Almost security blanket depth. It takes a different personality to don those duds.<p>Mil-spec cords. LOL. Downvote all you want. Just makes me think of that Crocodile Dundee dialog about the knife, except change knife to corduroy.
Anyone could have forked WordPress at any time or spun up their own multi tenant instances if they were truly concerned, this just seems personal. It’s a bad day for founders IMO.
The entire saga started due to WP Engine "forking" WordPress.
So problem solved? My only criticism is that 1) Mr. Mullenweg should have held tighter controls over the IP and 2) the direction to the community that they are encouraged to use "WP" as a prefix for their business names and products was ultimately a bad one leading to this mess..
WP Engine's "forking" consisted of disabling the revisions feature by default.<p>As someone who's personally been bitten by this particular WP Engine misfeature, describing this as a "fork" is disingenuous at best. The average Linux distro ships way more out-of-tree changes than WP Engine ever did.
it's personal only in the sense that Matt had been doing an absolutely awful job leading the company for several years, and the board had fiduciary obligations to intervene<p>this is not a bad day for founders; it's Matt having gotten to the end point of his value as a leader<p>Don't get me wrong: getting to a point where you have 2,000 employees and a 7 billion dollar valuation is a massive accomplishment. He was clearly very effective at various parts of the company's history. But it scaled beyond the point where his skillset and personality could continue to credibly steer the ship
If the board is going behind his back... then how does he know he was put on leave?
> Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.”<p>Real austin powers vibes<p>> He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark.
It's a little less dramatic than that. They did send a demand letter to automatic.css saying that since 'automatic' and 'automattic' differ by only one letter, are pronounced the same, and are marketed to similar groups the name is likely to cause confusion, hence automatic.css should change its name.<p>Which is not the same thing as claiming the word automatic generally.<p>Personally it sounds like a loser if they took it to court since (a) automatic <i>is</i> a common word and (b) they already asked automatic.css to add a "not affiliated with word press" disclaimer (which automatic.css did add). IANAL.
they own automatic.com right?