Seems like nobody is actually reading the TFA which is a shame because what the article describes is truly mind boggling:<p>>However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic<p>What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.
It does sound as if he has lost his grip on reality.<p>> <i>When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.”</i><p>And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.
I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.
The additional reporting at [0] about his alleged behaviour in internal channels along with his public posts on social media really reinforces this same feeling for me:<p>> “oh, since I’m a pirate now, I fucking curse. after 42 years of never uttering a curse word, it’s kinda fucking fun. if this is a HR problem @caron please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with @Mark Davies.” […] Mullenweg also posted that the Automattic Slack “smells funny, like turncoats” and said he was going to hang out in the WordPress.org Slack instead.<p>Good luck to everyone in the blast radius.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-swears-for-the-first-time-in-42-years-and-posts-hiring-call-to-move-my-stuff-off-automattic" rel="nofollow">https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-swears-for-th...</a>
There's an episode of Archer where Archer and another dude have to battle to the death to determine who the new pirate king is.<p>Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat?
you don’t get it he is quirky
Recent and related:<p><i>Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104</a> - Sept 2026 (144 comments)<p><i>Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283</a> - Sept 2026 (372 comments)<p>(I know there have been many other threads in this long saga but I don't have the time (or the stomach) to try to list them)<p>p.s. We merged an earlier thread (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683265">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683265</a>) into this one, which is why the timestamps of some of the comments are older.
So he was on a leave of absense, and now is no longer on such a leave? This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense, but they give no evidence of that in the article. I saw it suggested that he usually has wild ideas after returning from burning man, and the board wanted to insulate the company from the effects of that. That he's now back is evidence for a theory along those lines, and contradicts a theory that the board was trying to get rid of him. But I have no insight beyond that.
This title would benefit from editorializing “of Automattic” for those who do not follow the daily drama this individual has created.<p>ETA: Or better yet a clearer statement that nothing about this is clear.
So glad I just converted my site to Hugo.. happy to get away from this whole bunch of people.
What is curious is that there is very little "leak" from insiders regarding what is going on, how employees are living this joke level management.
I only see the headlines of this drama. All it tells me is to stay far away from any dependency on this company.
In 2010 WordPress seemed like important technology. It wasn’t perfect, was a big and fruitful hacking target, but it had been built and refined and had a big ecosystem.<p>I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP.<p>Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?
Definitely stay away from anything Matt Mullenweg is involved in. Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.
This sounds like a mistake and a part of Automatic. This is not a good look for the brand.
I only recently realised why the org is called AutoMATTic
Kumail Nanjiani learning what Automattic is: <a href="https://youtu.be/5Y64UeNeiOM?t=74" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/5Y64UeNeiOM?t=74</a>
It took me quite a while to "get" the "Arby's" restaurant name.
So on reading this comment I was like, "oh, I see, Arby's, like RB, roast beef?" Except on looking it up, that's not the explanation! "Arby's" <i>does</i> come from the initials "RB"... but it doesn't stand for "roast beef", it stands for "Raffel brothers"! Rather less obvious.
Did you know that Adidas was founded by Adolf "Adi" Dassler?
And Puma by his brother Rudi, in the same town. Great Feud story.
Another brother/brother business rivalry, although not involving founders, was Sears and Montgomery Ward from 1985-1990. In 1985 Bernard Brennan become CEO of Montgomery Ward and in that same year his older brother Edward Brennan become CEO of Sears.<p>Chicago-based Sears was the largest US retailer at the time, and Chicago-based Montgomery Ward was the 5th largest.
Similar thing with Aldi. Both brothers kept the name, sort of.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi#Split" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi#Split</a>
Rudidas would definitely be a worse name. Though I'd be surprised if an Amazon Marketplace knockoff brand is not already using it.
all day i diss another sibling
Imagine how glad they were at some point that they didn’t go with “Adolf’s Sneakers”!
A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).
Not really explaining autoMATTic. Amazon, "A" is because Jeff wanted it at the top of search. Fox, Dell, Walmart, Disney, all is closer to the example.
Dont these no-code chasing marketing teams have other ways of building their leadgen ponzi schemes instead of bothering with Wordpress by now?
Corporate coup survivors: Matt Mullenweg, Sam Altman, Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark. They should form a club.
What a feckless board.
sigh
> and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well,” a company spokesperson shared<p>Did anyone else think "what the fuck did I just read" after this sentence? Did Matt write it himself while posing as a "spokesperson"? This reads like that time Trump wrote in pseudonymously to a newspaper about how amazing and perfect Trump was.<p>Oh, I hadn't finished reading. The whole article is a WTF did I just read.
Despicable. What an obscene leader + board to not have the guts to remove him properly.
Dupe/existing discussion from a day ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104</a>
I really hate how heavily these comments get moderated. In my opinion if a site moderates user comments this heavily then the site should lose section 230 protections and be considered a publisher and be held responsible for any comments that you choose not to moderate. If the site functions as an editor but it tries to present that editorialized section as user opinions then the entire site may as well be astroturffed, your better off going to wikipedia to see what "regular people" think
The purpose of the Communications Decency Act is to allow providers to moderate community content, and section 230 provides liability from both undermoderating and overmoderating, so that providers don't forgo mederating altogether, for liability reasons.<p>If section 230 only protected from undermoderating and not from overmoderating, then providers would be incentivized to keep every comment up, from scam links to hate speech, because they'd only get in trouble for removing comments and not for allowing them.
Are you talking HN or TechCrunch?<p>If HN: it isn't a public service that has to allow free speech. One of the reasons it has persisted and maintained a certain level of quality is because of it's community rules, and their enforcement.
Isn't most of the moderation from downvotes rather than mods?
That’s a weird thing to say about “coup attempts.”<p>Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.<p>In the world of AI I imagine that Automattic’s core business model is in turmoil.
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.<p>Ianal but I don't think the laws care about governing structure of corps. You can start a new corp and run it democratically all you want. There are co-ops and other interesting structures out there
Afaik corps can only have board voting on the basis of share ownership ("one share one vote"), but you can mess around with how many votes each share class gets.<p>Co-ops can have more democratic voting arrangements, and usually have "one shareholder one vote" principles, though other options are available, and you can mess around with how many votes each shareholder gets.
Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.
It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy. It's <i>very explicitly</i> plutocracy (rule by money) as the operating principle of voting power is one share, one vote.<p>Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy.<p>If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.
> It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy<p>Voting is a democratic instrument, but a blunt one and not the most important.<p>"...those who spend five minutes voting every three years and call it democracy..."<p>Majoritarianism is undemocratic in that any desire less than 50% + 1 is deprecated.<p>If you care IMO the most important feature of a democracy is rule of law and access to the courts.
It's one share, one vote. And you have a choice: You can ask the company to pay you (ie. apply for a job there), or you can pay for a share in the company. Either way, the decisions are made by those who pay. And that can include you — anyone and everyone has the right to start a company and to employ others, anyone and everyone has the right to ask for shares in the company as part of negotiating compensation.<p>I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
> It's one share, one vote.<p>This is just wrong. As kmeisthax mentioned, shares can have different voting weights - if any at all. Many shareholders have <i>no</i> voting power.<p>> I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.<p>Did you actually employ them, or did you buy a specific service?
Who do you think pays for the political election campaign theater of all theses "democratic candidates" though?<p>I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.<p>Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy? I think we've seen over an over again which one works and which one doesn't.
> Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy?<p>Not at all. Market vs planned economy is about how the economy is set up. Are there businesses that offer products that you can choose between? That's a market economy. You can have that with democratic governance of corporations. The workers can own the means of production <i>and</i> you can have a market economy.<p>You don't need ownership by idiot dictators with money to have a market.
Democracy in business would be worker co-ops or employee ownership schemes. It would still be fully market-based, not planned.
Is that a settled question? China isn't exactly struggling right now.
China has succeeded so much by moving away from a planned economy when they were fully planned they were one of the poorest nations in the world. Most successful nations are mixed economies and yes, this is a settled question.
Past performance is no indication of future success. It doesn't matter what's been successful in the past, these things can change. Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed and so did the narrative.<p>None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.
> Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed<p>The word you're looking for is "collapse". It's when something is stable at one point in time, but then later breaks down. That's what "changed". It wasn't random like weather or something. The economic systems collapsed.<p>> None of this is settled<p>The fact that it has happened numerous times in different parts of the world makes it pretty settled in my mind.
> Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was)
According to whom?
They were very poor before central planning, and the central planning is what got them from being very poor to relatively poor and economically powerful.
If you look on Alibaba or AliExpress and see different companies competing and undercutting each others prices, I don't really see it as a planned economy.
The CCP publishes their primary central planning mechanism for all to see. They just adopted the new 15th Five Year Plan in March [1].<p>There’s a whole bureaucracy just to coordinate the implementation at the sector, provincial, and corporate level driven by the State Council, NDRC, and NPC. Governments at all levels are involved with coming up with their own implementation plans to execute on the Five Year Plan.<p>You can trace decades of Chinese industrial development to those plans but the Chinese system is very different from the Soviet central planning mechanism, which is why I think you’re misinterpreting Alibaba’s price competition. The CCP explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like Alibaba and the manufacturers on it to compete; that’s their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the five year plan instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but it’s very much there.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Five-Year_Plan" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Five-Year_Plan</a>
I think a better term might be a “steered economy”. You see fierce competition in some very specific and preordained market areas. Lithium batteries, solar panels, electric cars, industrial and autonomous robots, AI.<p>Now go look at the 5 year plan from Beijing. Green technology, robotics, mature node chips, and AI are the focuses.<p>In other words, it isn’t a mistake that China dominates in the industries that it does.
> China isn't exactly struggling right now.<p>Have you asked people in China about this?
It's allowed to do a more democratic business in most countries, it's called a:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative</a><p>There have been some govts that mandated this type of organization for part of their economy; we usually refer to that as communism.<p>(no value judgement here, there are day's when I'm quite a commie myself)
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.<p>Congratulations you have reinvented communism from first principles! And you are completely correct in your analysis.