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He is surely very evidently mentally ill. This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for

by dofm 28d ago

He is surely very evidently mentally ill. 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. 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. I am of the opinion that his broad charge against WP Engine was valid; I think he handled it insanely. 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. 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.

muglug 28d ago
> He is surely very evidently mentally ill. I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful. 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. 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.
- dofm 28d ago
  > I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful. There are, to me, abundant signs that he is severely burned out, dysregulated and irrational. (In this statement, in other statements, in his actions that wilfully worsened his own case against WP Engine, in his blog posts etc.) 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. 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 themselves alluding to his health. He clearly needs a break from the thing he does for his own benefit. 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.
  - stackghost 27d ago
    It just sounds like the behaviours of an unprofessional douchebag to me, not mental illness
    - abanana 27d ago
      Exactly. Don't use "mental illness" as an excuse, he's just incredibly arrogant.
    - shakna 27d ago
      But when the same person was extremely professional, kind and helpful, six months before a sudden shift in behaviour?
      - graemep 27d ago
        People change. A change may or may not be the result of mental illness. I know many people who have changed greatly for the better because of life experiences or their own choices, and many people who have changed for the worse. We all do it to some extent, though maybe not dramatically or publicly.
      - opiotrek 27d ago
        He was unprofessional for years, see the firings of 2024
        dofm 27d ago
        Right but that is part of this long rolling episode that started with the WP Engine thing, which is really when he began to act in an unhinged way. That is really when the sudden shift in his public manner happened. It has been going on that long. He should have stepped back as either Automattic CEO or Wordpress BFDL at least a year ago IMO; the ACF/SCF debacle settled it. WP and the community around it would have been better for it if he had.
        voakbasda 27d ago
- pocksuppet 27d ago
  That is mental illness. It doesn't imply that a virus took hold of your brain cells. It can be inability to cope with the real world. I suspect most of us will go through it at some point in our lives.
- pluc 27d ago
  I think he has cultivated a group of yes-man to surround him and that he is so out of touch with non-WP reality that he thought he would be seen as a hero defending open-source ethics. He didn't account for the fact that everyone that he doesn't pay isn't under his spell, and that everyone saw the selfishness behind the heroism.
- patcon 26d ago
  > I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner. This framing is so generous and I'm grateful for it. Thank you. Makes me optimistic about public discourse to see iterative reframings toward observations like this
deleted 28d ago
[deleted]
kmeisthax 28d ago
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 hosting platform is leeching off the WordPress ecosystem is absurd, for two reasons: 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 already a beneficial part of the ecosystem. 2. WP Engine was contributing back to the WordPress ecosystem, just not Matt Mullenweg's corner of it. 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. [0] Formerly Content Construction Kit [1] Full disclosure: I hate Gutenberg. It is not WordPress, it's a React development kit tumor shoved inside WordPress. Any other page builder would be preferable.
- neya 27d ago
  Finally a sane comment. If you actually watched the interview with Theo, he openly admits to just randomly throwing in a demand of arbitrary percentage of their sales. The whole episode is actually insane.
- mschuster91 27d ago
  > 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. Many an old open-source project ran into this trap. Elasticsearch is one good example. Back when the old GPL era open-source projects were invented, the idea of third parties taking open-source software and just making a shitload of money with it was unthought of - and certainly not at the scale of Amazon AWS. The only counterexample was Wikipedia's MediaWiki, it similarly is GPL but from the start it was clear that there would be at least one commercial side actor - Wikia, nowadays called Fandom.
flomo 27d ago
> He is surely very evidently mentally ill. I agree and upvoted your post. But can I just say that it is super-reddit to diagnose someone based on your B- undergrad psych classes. We should go back to the classics like "he went off his rocker!", or "he's totally unhinged!" or "completely delulu!" (of course the people who know, know, and they shouldn't tell you.)
- deleted 27d ago
  [deleted]
- elevation 27d ago
  > it is super-reddit to diagnose If I see a person with a broken bone protruding from their arm, I don't need an undergrad med-terms class to know "this person needs medical attention" even if I am not qualified to render it. Similarly, there are certain thresholds of human behavior that indicate mental illness -- you don't have to be licensed to treat it in order to recognize that there is a serious problem.
  - pibaker 27d ago
    I wonder if GP would change his mind if he had witnessed Matt posting through the lawsuit in this very own website.
    - flomo 25d ago
      Just for the record, I did see him posting on HN, and he seemed highly motivated by $$$ (and pride). He certainly seemed rational, other than the fact he shouldn't have been posting here. Businessman makes bad business decision and doubles-down. Not quite insanity.
  - paimapi 27d ago
    actually interpreting the DSM-V and running diagnostics is exclusive to clinically trained psychologists and psychiatrists. even LCSWs are remiss to offer a 'diagnosis' after years of talk therapy with a client. most official diagnoses happen within a matrix describing a cluster of symptoms paired with an eval of severity and impact on life, and a battery of tests that have been empirically and rigorously validated as my wife (who does have an MD and specializes in psychistry) is fond of saying when people ask her to diagnose someone she doesn't know, "Sometimes people are just weird" it could be that the guy here is just very burnt out and stressed and his healthier coping mechanisms aren't working so he's resorting to worse ones you can be empathetic to that without calling someone 'mentally ill'
smt88 27d ago
There's no need to diagnose Mullenweg when his behavior could easily be explained by being a run-of-the-mill arrogant asshole. He never seems to have broken from reality or suffered a mental breakdown. He seems to just treat people (including his employees, customers, and competitors) like garbage who are beneath him.
- dofm 27d ago
  That is a question of interpretation. But based on my own life experiences I think there is enough evidence that he is in deep, rolling burnout. He is making severely self-sabotaging actions that appear to be designed to force clarity through extreme choices, he now writes emotionally in a way that seems desperate and polarising. These are the signs of a man in crisis. No doubt he has always been a bit of an arrogant arsehole (nothing unusual in that) but mental illness is not just big splashy stuff like psychosis or full on breakdowns. Burnout at this point is not just some occupational health thing, it’s more like a chronic disorder.
Mooty 27d ago
Agree as well he has lost his mind in the battle and does not appear to be trustable in such a competitive market at current state of things (well .. ai). Probably a good move to move on with someone else that doesn't need to get microdosis at burning man yearly to get ideas.
- deleted 27d ago
  [deleted]
safety1st 27d ago
Let's leave the diagnoses to the doctors please. The guy was public about being under a lot of stress and that's fine and salient to acknowledge. But it's misleading to use medical terminology unless you're actually his doctor and have evaluated him following the protocols of your profession. Which we know you are not -- if you were -- you would be bound by patient confidentiality, and not posting a diagnosis here. So just say his job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed. Don't medicalize it.
- dofm 27d ago
  I am "evaluating" him as someone who feels he has come unglued in a similarly severe but less public way and recognises a fellow traveller. I'm fully entitled to say this, am I not? It's just my opinion. I am not "medicalising" it — not least because the medical profession does not recognise burnout as mental illness (because it gets it backward and assumes it is an occupational health issue). I am saying he is, to me, evidently mentally ill in the way I feel I have been mentally ill. I wouldn't accept a doctor telling me my problems are work stress. "His job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed" is IMO classic American-influenced minimisation of middle-aged male mental ill-health. I would be shocked if what is going on is in any meaningful way limited to his "job performance" and that apart from the job everything else is going fine.
  - safety1st 27d ago
    I am only entreating you to be accurate about the terminology used. Due to its historical use by psychologists the term mental illness is generally thought to be synonymous with mental disorder, which is the modern term that refers to a specific illness classified in the DSM-IV which psychiatrists may diagnose. There are only so many of them, and they are defined, and they are diagnosed by name by doctors. To me it is not a matter of sensitivity, and certainly not one of underplaying, but of precision. If you want to diagnose Matt you need to tell us which DSM-IV disorder he is afflicted by and what your authority for the diagnosis is. It sounds like that was not your intent so it would be more clear if you referred to his psychological distress, or sure, "has come unglued"/"lost his mind," or just said he seemed mentally unwell. None of these imply that you're a doctor making a formal diagnosis. They also do not imply that the problem is somehow lessened -- you just aren't mapping it to a definition in the DSM (which ultimately implies some amount of endorsement for treatment, including specific therapies and drugs depending on what you diagnosed). There are unfortunately people out there who will read your comment and take it to mean that a doctor actually diagnosed Matt.
Anthony-G 27d ago
I’ve upvoted your comments in this thread because what you’re saying seems obvious to me. You’re also being empathetic and respectful to the man while crediting his legacy and all the work he has done in his past. I wonder if the people objecting to your statement would object as strenuously had you had phrased it as “evidently mentally unwell”. The word “ill” seems to have triggered people into reading more into it than what was actually said. If a stranger sees me violently coughing and sneezing in public, they would be correct to say that I’m evidently physically ill. They’re not trying to diagnose whether the illness is a common cold, Influenza A, Covid-19 or any other respiratory disease.
- dofm 27d ago
  > I wonder if the people objecting to your statement would object as strenuously had you had phrased it as “evidently mentally unwell”. The word “ill” seems to have triggered people into reading more into it than what was actually said. This is a reasonable hair to split, I agree with you and I think it might have gone differently (though "mentally" itself will trigger people, and there is a lot of certainty that he must be a particular arsehole simply because of the history of WordPress, or Gutenberg, or whatever it was that coloured their judgement).
  - kelnos 25d ago
    I think there's also, from some people (sometimes including myself), a negative reaction to armchair diagnoses of mental illness. I think it's a problem because it's a faux medical diagnosis made by someone who is not qualified to make it, based on public statements and coverage that are too far removed from the reality of the personal situation to be a fair judgment.
apple4ever 27d ago
Good post, especially this > I am of the opinion that his broad charge against WP Engine was valid; I think he handled it insanely. I cannot believe how he handled it. Had he not crashed out, he may have succeeded in getting things right.
gregory23 27d ago
You could say "he's behaving irrationally" or even "he seems to be experiencing severe burnout".. But your exact phrasing is way too close to an "online diagnosis" (which is not a valid way to assess a mental illness - afaik no psychiatrist would ever diagnose anyone without ever talking to a person). On top of that, it's too close to an ad hominem - even if you didn't mean it that way. Everyone is fighting their own demons. Some people are neurodivergent, but nothing good ever happens from an unsolicited "diagnosis" or slapping labels like "unglued". Every one of us can snap under enough pressure. Let's not go there.
- dofm 26d ago
  It certainly and very clearly was not an ad hominem. Stop projecting things onto what I said so you can criticise me.

by dofm 28d ago

muglug 28d ago

> He is surely very evidently mentally ill. I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful. 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. 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.

dofm 28d ago
> I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful. There are, to me, abundant signs that he is severely burned out, dysregulated and irrational. (In this statement, in other statements, in his actions that wilfully worsened his own case against WP Engine, in his blog posts etc.) 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. 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 themselves alluding to his health. He clearly needs a break from the thing he does for his own benefit. 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.
- stackghost 27d ago
  It just sounds like the behaviours of an unprofessional douchebag to me, not mental illness
  - abanana 27d ago
    Exactly. Don't use "mental illness" as an excuse, he's just incredibly arrogant.
  - shakna 27d ago
    But when the same person was extremely professional, kind and helpful, six months before a sudden shift in behaviour?
    - graemep 27d ago
      People change. A change may or may not be the result of mental illness. I know many people who have changed greatly for the better because of life experiences or their own choices, and many people who have changed for the worse. We all do it to some extent, though maybe not dramatically or publicly.
    - opiotrek 27d ago
      He was unprofessional for years, see the firings of 2024
      - dofm 27d ago
        Right but that is part of this long rolling episode that started with the WP Engine thing, which is really when he began to act in an unhinged way. That is really when the sudden shift in his public manner happened. It has been going on that long. He should have stepped back as either Automattic CEO or Wordpress BFDL at least a year ago IMO; the ACF/SCF debacle settled it. WP and the community around it would have been better for it if he had.
        voakbasda 27d ago
pocksuppet 27d ago
That is mental illness. It doesn't imply that a virus took hold of your brain cells. It can be inability to cope with the real world. I suspect most of us will go through it at some point in our lives.
pluc 27d ago
I think he has cultivated a group of yes-man to surround him and that he is so out of touch with non-WP reality that he thought he would be seen as a hero defending open-source ethics. He didn't account for the fact that everyone that he doesn't pay isn't under his spell, and that everyone saw the selfishness behind the heroism.
patcon 26d ago
> I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner. This framing is so generous and I'm grateful for it. Thank you. Makes me optimistic about public discourse to see iterative reframings toward observations like this

deleted 28d ago

[deleted]

kmeisthax 28d ago

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 hosting platform is leeching off the WordPress ecosystem is absurd, for two reasons: 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 already a beneficial part of the ecosystem. 2. WP Engine was contributing back to the WordPress ecosystem, just not Matt Mullenweg's corner of it. 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. [0] Formerly Content Construction Kit [1] Full disclosure: I hate Gutenberg. It is not WordPress, it's a React development kit tumor shoved inside WordPress. Any other page builder would be preferable.

neya 27d ago
Finally a sane comment. If you actually watched the interview with Theo, he openly admits to just randomly throwing in a demand of arbitrary percentage of their sales. The whole episode is actually insane.
mschuster91 27d ago
> 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. Many an old open-source project ran into this trap. Elasticsearch is one good example. Back when the old GPL era open-source projects were invented, the idea of third parties taking open-source software and just making a shitload of money with it was unthought of - and certainly not at the scale of Amazon AWS. The only counterexample was Wikipedia's MediaWiki, it similarly is GPL but from the start it was clear that there would be at least one commercial side actor - Wikia, nowadays called Fandom.

flomo 27d ago

> He is surely very evidently mentally ill. I agree and upvoted your post. But can I just say that it is super-reddit to diagnose someone based on your B- undergrad psych classes. We should go back to the classics like "he went off his rocker!", or "he's totally unhinged!" or "completely delulu!" (of course the people who know, know, and they shouldn't tell you.)

deleted 27d ago
[deleted]
elevation 27d ago
> it is super-reddit to diagnose If I see a person with a broken bone protruding from their arm, I don't need an undergrad med-terms class to know "this person needs medical attention" even if I am not qualified to render it. Similarly, there are certain thresholds of human behavior that indicate mental illness -- you don't have to be licensed to treat it in order to recognize that there is a serious problem.
- pibaker 27d ago
  I wonder if GP would change his mind if he had witnessed Matt posting through the lawsuit in this very own website.
  - flomo 25d ago
    Just for the record, I did see him posting on HN, and he seemed highly motivated by $$$ (and pride). He certainly seemed rational, other than the fact he shouldn't have been posting here. Businessman makes bad business decision and doubles-down. Not quite insanity.
- paimapi 27d ago
  actually interpreting the DSM-V and running diagnostics is exclusive to clinically trained psychologists and psychiatrists. even LCSWs are remiss to offer a 'diagnosis' after years of talk therapy with a client. most official diagnoses happen within a matrix describing a cluster of symptoms paired with an eval of severity and impact on life, and a battery of tests that have been empirically and rigorously validated as my wife (who does have an MD and specializes in psychistry) is fond of saying when people ask her to diagnose someone she doesn't know, "Sometimes people are just weird" it could be that the guy here is just very burnt out and stressed and his healthier coping mechanisms aren't working so he's resorting to worse ones you can be empathetic to that without calling someone 'mentally ill'

smt88 27d ago

There's no need to diagnose Mullenweg when his behavior could easily be explained by being a run-of-the-mill arrogant asshole. He never seems to have broken from reality or suffered a mental breakdown. He seems to just treat people (including his employees, customers, and competitors) like garbage who are beneath him.

dofm 27d ago
That is a question of interpretation. But based on my own life experiences I think there is enough evidence that he is in deep, rolling burnout. He is making severely self-sabotaging actions that appear to be designed to force clarity through extreme choices, he now writes emotionally in a way that seems desperate and polarising. These are the signs of a man in crisis. No doubt he has always been a bit of an arrogant arsehole (nothing unusual in that) but mental illness is not just big splashy stuff like psychosis or full on breakdowns. Burnout at this point is not just some occupational health thing, it’s more like a chronic disorder.

Mooty 27d ago

Agree as well he has lost his mind in the battle and does not appear to be trustable in such a competitive market at current state of things (well .. ai). Probably a good move to move on with someone else that doesn't need to get microdosis at burning man yearly to get ideas.

deleted 27d ago
[deleted]

safety1st 27d ago

Let's leave the diagnoses to the doctors please. The guy was public about being under a lot of stress and that's fine and salient to acknowledge. But it's misleading to use medical terminology unless you're actually his doctor and have evaluated him following the protocols of your profession. Which we know you are not -- if you were -- you would be bound by patient confidentiality, and not posting a diagnosis here. So just say his job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed. Don't medicalize it.

dofm 27d ago
I am "evaluating" him as someone who feels he has come unglued in a similarly severe but less public way and recognises a fellow traveller. I'm fully entitled to say this, am I not? It's just my opinion. I am not "medicalising" it — not least because the medical profession does not recognise burnout as mental illness (because it gets it backward and assumes it is an occupational health issue). I am saying he is, to me, evidently mentally ill in the way I feel I have been mentally ill. I wouldn't accept a doctor telling me my problems are work stress. "His job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed" is IMO classic American-influenced minimisation of middle-aged male mental ill-health. I would be shocked if what is going on is in any meaningful way limited to his "job performance" and that apart from the job everything else is going fine.
- safety1st 27d ago
  I am only entreating you to be accurate about the terminology used. Due to its historical use by psychologists the term mental illness is generally thought to be synonymous with mental disorder, which is the modern term that refers to a specific illness classified in the DSM-IV which psychiatrists may diagnose. There are only so many of them, and they are defined, and they are diagnosed by name by doctors. To me it is not a matter of sensitivity, and certainly not one of underplaying, but of precision. If you want to diagnose Matt you need to tell us which DSM-IV disorder he is afflicted by and what your authority for the diagnosis is. It sounds like that was not your intent so it would be more clear if you referred to his psychological distress, or sure, "has come unglued"/"lost his mind," or just said he seemed mentally unwell. None of these imply that you're a doctor making a formal diagnosis. They also do not imply that the problem is somehow lessened -- you just aren't mapping it to a definition in the DSM (which ultimately implies some amount of endorsement for treatment, including specific therapies and drugs depending on what you diagnosed). There are unfortunately people out there who will read your comment and take it to mean that a doctor actually diagnosed Matt.

Anthony-G 27d ago

I’ve upvoted your comments in this thread because what you’re saying seems obvious to me. You’re also being empathetic and respectful to the man while crediting his legacy and all the work he has done in his past. I wonder if the people objecting to your statement would object as strenuously had you had phrased it as “evidently mentally unwell”. The word “ill” seems to have triggered people into reading more into it than what was actually said. If a stranger sees me violently coughing and sneezing in public, they would be correct to say that I’m evidently physically ill. They’re not trying to diagnose whether the illness is a common cold, Influenza A, Covid-19 or any other respiratory disease.

dofm 27d ago
> I wonder if the people objecting to your statement would object as strenuously had you had phrased it as “evidently mentally unwell”. The word “ill” seems to have triggered people into reading more into it than what was actually said. This is a reasonable hair to split, I agree with you and I think it might have gone differently (though "mentally" itself will trigger people, and there is a lot of certainty that he must be a particular arsehole simply because of the history of WordPress, or Gutenberg, or whatever it was that coloured their judgement).
- kelnos 25d ago
  I think there's also, from some people (sometimes including myself), a negative reaction to armchair diagnoses of mental illness. I think it's a problem because it's a faux medical diagnosis made by someone who is not qualified to make it, based on public statements and coverage that are too far removed from the reality of the personal situation to be a fair judgment.

apple4ever 27d ago

Good post, especially this > I am of the opinion that his broad charge against WP Engine was valid; I think he handled it insanely. I cannot believe how he handled it. Had he not crashed out, he may have succeeded in getting things right.

gregory23 27d ago

You could say "he's behaving irrationally" or even "he seems to be experiencing severe burnout".. But your exact phrasing is way too close to an "online diagnosis" (which is not a valid way to assess a mental illness - afaik no psychiatrist would ever diagnose anyone without ever talking to a person). On top of that, it's too close to an ad hominem - even if you didn't mean it that way. Everyone is fighting their own demons. Some people are neurodivergent, but nothing good ever happens from an unsolicited "diagnosis" or slapping labels like "unglued". Every one of us can snap under enough pressure. Let's not go there.

dofm 26d ago
It certainly and very clearly was not an ad hominem. Stop projecting things onto what I said so you can criticise me.