8 ms·

Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

458 points by LeoPanthera 22d ago

chris_wot 22d ago
This is likely how they pull out of the disasterous legal actions Mullenweg has taken.
Shank 22d ago
> “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.” 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 will lead to that outcome.
- SaltyBackendGuy 22d ago
  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.
  - datakan 22d ago
    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. Had a CISO leave for "personal" reasons. Talked to him a couple years later and yeah, he was fired. 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.
    - actionfromafar 22d ago
      Ah, but they take the big risks, you see. Someone has to do it.
    - gottorf 22d ago
      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. 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.
      - consp 22d ago
        I would argue there is a broad difference in ethicality and reason between the bottom and top of the food chain, making these examples less clear cut. If your plan as a low level employee doesn't work out you still get fired and the consequences are far greater.
      - DemocracyFTW2 22d ago
        > I don't think stealing $20 makes the local news these days https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_Emmely https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_Emmely Got fired because she redeemed two orphaned bottle deposit slips worth 1,30€ (in 2009, so more like 1,50€ in today's money /s). Caused a nation-wide discussion.
        ZiiS 21d ago
        It was the being fired that made the news; not the stealing.
        phonon 21d ago
        I don't think anything will beat https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/15148829 https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/15148829 School principal fired and loses $130k pension for overfilling coffee (about 50 cents).
  - patternMachine 22d ago
    Barring truly bad behavior this is how executives get fired.
  - tibbydudeza 22d ago
    Spend more time with my family :).
  - telotortium 22d ago
    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.
    - adw 22d ago
      Fidji Simo has well documented chronic health issues so there’s no reason to assume that the ostensible and actual reasoning are far apart there.
      - telotortium 22d ago
        But the fact that she went on leave just as it became clear that Anthropic looked to be hitting escape velocity is suspicious, although not dispositive. When she was hired, her health issues also stopped her from coming into the office, but she still worked from home.
    - hodgesrm 22d ago
      People go on leave regularly for health reasons, and Fidji Simo has been quite open about her health. Unless you have evidence of your claim, the official explanation is simplest. That's especially the case here since firing someone on health leave can expose you to lawsuits under labor law in the US and many other countries.
  - recursivegirth 22d ago
    Like sama? (Hope I don't get dang'ed for being political, especially against a ycombi founder...)
  - 0xbadcafebee 22d ago
    Firing a CEO makes your company look bad. Even if you are firing them, you don't say you're firing them.
  - a012 22d ago
    See his other comments in HN in the previous wp “incident”, simply said he _is_ nut
    - photomatt 22d ago
      [flagged]
      - rrherr 21d ago
        Hello matt this is your lawyer speaking. I am advising you today to please keep posting this shit
        deleted 21d ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 21d ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 21d ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 21d ago
        [deleted]
        12_throw_away 21d ago
        I'm just posting to say hi to the various paralegals and clerks putting together their exhibits in the case. Hope you're having a good one!
  - discopicante 21d ago
    Executives do not get fired like other employees. They have contracts that usually prevent standard dismissal unless they have done something illegal. When they are 'fired', they are still a protected class. Hence the narrative spin: a new 'ceremonial' role, spending time with family, etc. etc. Make no mistake, he has been fired. It just looks different than a call with HR or a manager and office security telling you to pack up your $hit and leave.
- dofm 22d 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 22d 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 22d 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.
- lukestevens 22d ago
  Who knows, maybe he can try and blackmail them too[0] to get his way. It's worked out great so far. [0] https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt#102-wp-engine-files-suit-against-matt-and-automattic https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt#102-wp-engine-fi...
- jongjong 22d ago
  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. 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.
  - fwip 21d ago
    It seems that the typical CEO has enough yes-men that it bruises their ego to have anyone suggest that they aren't great in any respect.
- neya 22d ago
  I think his recent screwing over of that custom fields plugin team and cutting off access to the plugins repo for WPengine was really a dumb move that has lead him to where he is now.
- kakwa_ 22d ago
  You very rarely fire execs these days, the main reason being you don't want them to sue the company over their loss of reputation. You want to keep-up appearances and leave some plausible deniability, even if it's generally BS.
- Wowfunhappy 21d ago
  > If you’re doing this type of accusation [...] odds are you’re never coming back. [...] Crashing out and waging war on the board will lead to that outcome. ...one exception comes to my mind, and it's Steve Jobs. Probably a total outlier case, but, still.
  - domador 20d ago
    It Jobs a long time to come back, though, and it looks like he had to prove himself (as a businessman) in other ways while he was in exile. The board seems to have been filled with different people at the time it came back. It's probably much harder to come back under the same board with the same people, and it doesn't sound like Jobs was an exception to that aspect.
- ChrisMarshallNY 21d ago
  Sounds like it's something that must have been painful, all around. Boards really don't like doing things like this, as it signals instability, and shareholders hate instability. That's why so many boards leave clearly non-optimal CEOs in place, so often. This is not something that has been a focus of my attention, except when it was shoved into my face. I'm really too old for that kind of agita. I do run a couple of WP sites. I'm considering switching a couple to static sites, (via a generator, or maybe LLM-generated static sites), but I need one of them to remain WP (for now), as that hosts my blog.
  - pwillia7 21d ago
    Just vibe code your own mini cms on top of your static site. Seriously though, I did this recently with mine and have had great results. It's not a Gutenberg WP experience, more like a decapCMS kind of thing.
    - boutell 21d ago
      There are quite a few CMSes that do static builds natively. If you hand one of those to Claude Code, you can get a more flexible and maintainable result more quickly. You can also point Claude Code to a CMS starter project in folder A And a vibe coded static site in folder B and pull them together. That being said... if you're the sole author of your site, anything goes and yeah, you probably don't need a proper CMS. I certainly built my own share of 100-line Perl static site builders back in the day.
    - eloisant 21d ago
      It's easier to generate a static site using a WP hidden behind a VPN than building a mini cms on top of a static site.
  - jcarrano 21d ago
    My impression was that the major argument against static site generators is the unfriendly UX for non-technical contributors to the site, and with LLMs that problem is completely solved.
- cebert 21d ago
  I don’t have any skin in the game with this, and I don’t use WP. It appears Matt needs help right now. I don’t think he’s reacting rationally based on what he’s posting online or allegedly inside his former organization. I don’t know him, but it’s hard seeing people in a difficult time who need help.
- sidewndr46 21d ago
  This doesn't really sound like an accusation. It sounds like fact. It'd probably hold up under a deposition in a courtroom. I really don't think the board has any reason to even dispute this account of events.
- fwip 21d ago
  Matt "photomatt" Mullenweg is fundamentally incapable of not crashing out. It's very predictable for anyone at all familiar with the WPEngine saga, or slightly earlier, his personal beef with Tumblr user predstrogen (which involved him following her off of Tumblr after he banned her to harass her on Twitter).
_fw 22d ago
I briefly worked in the web agency SaaS space and hoooo boy, I have never known a more gossipy or dramatic industry. That’s not to pass comment either way on Mullenweg It’s just WordPress folk are nuts.
ramon156 22d ago
Reminds me of the first season of Succession
- turnsontv 22d ago
  [dead]
  - 3stacks 22d ago
    based and bookpilled
hermitcrab 22d ago
>Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.” What is wrong with these people?
- wmf 22d ago
  That's how you can tell the article isn't giving you the full picture.
- gkoberger 22d ago
  I was curious what this meant, so I looked into it. They asked Automatic.css to change their name: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1omrtrk/automattic_wants_a_popular_framework_called/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1omrtrk/automatt... Automatic.css is a paid CSS framework specifically for WordPress. Legally speaking I have no opinion here, but I don't think it's as out-of-pocket as it sounds.
  - hermitcrab 22d ago
    The article linked ( https://www.404media.co/automattic-automatic-trademark-matt-mullenweg-kevin-geary/ https://www.404media.co/automattic-automatic-trademark-matt-... ) is behind a paywall. But reading https://www.searchenginejournal.com/automattic-disputes-use-of-word-automatic-for-wordpress-product/560353/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/automattic-disputes-use-... it sounds like the claim 'Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic"' might not be accurate.
    - notahacker 22d ago
      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 for a third party commercial service specifically designed to customise Automattic's product to adopt seems to be at the reasonable end of trademark disputes...
  - BeetleB 22d ago
    [flagged]
bellowsgulch 22d ago
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. In the mean time, if you're unable to derisk Mullenweg out of your business stack, this is a good first step.
- SwellJoe 22d ago
  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.
  - pathartl 22d ago
    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.
    - SwellJoe 22d ago
      Sure, but, even with AI and the technical competence to steer it, it's still a pretty big lift to switch from, e.g. WordPress with billing and various other stuff to some ad hoc other thing. Even when I decided I was done with managing content in WordPress and moved it out to a Hugo static site for my company website, I still kept the commerce stuff in WordPress just because it works and we know it works from a decade or so of operation. I'm certainly not deploying new WordPress sites, partly because of how weird and hostile Mullenweg has made the WordPress ecosystem for no good reason. I don't even necessarily disagree with the sentiments behind his words and actions, but the methods and how far it's gone in terms of lawfare is just silly and destructive. Anyway, they won't get decades like Oracle has gotten. But, they've got a few years of comfy margins ahead if they don't blow it up too badly.
nubinetwork 22d ago
[flagged]
gkoberger 22d ago
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. 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). WordPress has been his life for 23 years. Doing the same thing for 23 years likely makes it difficult to have a proper perspective.
- biglyburrito 22d ago
  "Unfortunately"??
  - gkoberger 22d ago
    "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.
    - solarkraft 22d ago
      Automattic also bought Tumblr and Pocket Casts, publishing the code of the latter. I used to have a subscription just to support them.
      - dofm 22d ago
        And Simplenote.
        joelanman 22d ago
        Which is no longer in active development https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195093
dcrazy 22d ago
I guess when people vote the same way, it’s technically a conspiracy?
- biglyburrito 22d ago
  No, it's called "voting".
  - dcrazy 22d ago
    That was my point. My sarcasm mustn’t have come through.
- antonvs 22d ago
  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.
garbagepatch 22d ago
Here is the whole saga until May 2025: https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7fc225d https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
- pluc 22d ago
  https://mullenweg.wtf/ https://mullenweg.wtf/ picked up after that
- adrienne 22d ago
  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.
  - classictraffic 22d ago
    Hope you’re doing better these days!
- graemep 21d ago
  That lead me to a number of good sources, especially this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/24/automattic-vs-wp-engine/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/24/automattic-vs-wp-engine/ which links to a lot more I already knew Matt was throwing a tantrum and refusing to address conflicts of interest. However WP Engine also do not come out of it looking good. Nor do a lot of people in the WP community. Matt is a problem, but it does not look like he is the only problem.
  - toyg 21d ago
    The Wordpress community got so big, that inevitably it attracted leeches. Unfortunately, Matt chose to address a home-infestation problem with a firethrower.
    - graemep 21d ago
      Great way to put it. Ignoring collateral damage too.
solarkraft 22d ago
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. 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. I’m a bit surprised they didn’t pull the plug earlier given they could have. Hasn’t he already caused vast damage? 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.
ValentineC 22d ago
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.
- ojame 22d ago
  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%. 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.
  - angry_octet 22d ago
    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.
    - Onavo 22d ago
      > If he wants that level of control he would need to take the company private, and various investor agreements probably prevent this. Since when was Automatic a public listed company?
      - angry_octet 22d ago
        I should have said: establish sole ownership.
      - gkanai 22d ago
        It is not. They did take VC funding however, which is when the board and the investor agreements came into force.
ChoosesBarbecue 22d ago
I am so curious why now, what changed? The WPEngine saga was started two years ago.
- minimaxir 22d ago
  It never ended.
  - ChoosesBarbecue 22d ago
    Touché, reworded it to be clearer on what I meant :).
- nikcub 22d ago
  from my own observations: 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. 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. wordpress and automattic haven't responded to this well, at all. at times it is often straight denial. 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
  - gpm 22d ago
    How is the WPEngine case going anyways? Glancing at the docket [1] in an attempt to answer this myself... looks like the trial is scheduled for a bit over a year from now [2].. A ton of fighting over discovery... a motion asking for fairly monster sanctions for spoilation of evidence [3] (to be argued on the 30th). Claiming in [3] with what appear to be pretty solid receipts (as far as we can see through the redactions anyways) that Matt was willfully destroying communications related to the case and subject to the discovery - and Automattic's lawyers lied to the court that they preserved them (naturally Automattic's lawyers have a reply with an entirely different interpretation of events if you go look for it... but at least at a glance WPEngine seems more convincing). [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/wpengine-inc-v-automattic-inc/?filed_after=&filed_before=&entry_gte=&entry_lte=&order_by=desc https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/wpengine-inc-v... [2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.437474/gov.uscourts.cand.437474.371.2.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43... [3] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.437474/gov.uscourts.cand.437474.357.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
reticulates 22d ago
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. Here is Matt talking about his control: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150
- pluc 22d ago
  I'd definitely take away his access having seen how vindictive he has been throughout the WPE saga, for everyone's sake
- Spinfusor 22d ago
  If he has 84% voting share, can't he just fire the board?
  - chris_wot 22d ago
    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. 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.
    - FreakLegion 22d ago
      > While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board This is very unlikely. True Ventures almost certainly controls at least one seat. (Until Phil Black left last year they actually held two seats, but that doesn't mean they had the right to. Either way, at the moment it's just Toni Schneider.)
tibbydudeza 22d ago
Finally.
0xDEADBEEFCAFE 22d ago
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.
- minimaxir 22d ago
  The entire saga started due to WP Engine "forking" WordPress.
  - 0xDEADBEEFCAFE 22d ago
    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..
    - nixosbestos 22d ago
      Matt, ... just log out and take a break.
    - garbagepatch 22d ago
      Matt, you shouldn't have picked a FLOSS license if you didn't intend for the software to be FLOSS in the first place.
    - sehansen 21d ago
      If they'd done those two things Wordpress would probably have been far less successful. Which certainly is a way of making WP Engine not even want to do what they did. Heck, they would probably not even exist.
  - kmeisthax 22d ago
    WP Engine's "forking" consisted of disabling the revisions feature by default. 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.
echoangle 22d ago
> Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.” Real austin powers vibes > He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark.
- variaga 22d ago
  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. Which is not the same thing as claiming the word automatic generally. Personally it sounds like a loser if they took it to court since (a) automatic is 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.
- ifahimreza 22d ago
  they own automatic.com right?
josefritzishere 22d ago
The best line was buried at the bottom. Did Automattic really attempt to claim it owns the word “automatic?
- Freak_NL 22d ago
  This is better explained elsewhere in this thread, but it boils down to a totally valid trademark dispute over a company calling itself Automatic.css which supplies services for WordPress installs.
pier25 22d ago
It's impressive this took so long.
- InsideOutSanta 22d ago
  I had the opposite thought: I'm impressed the board did anything at all, given how useless they are at most companies.
deleted 22d ago
[deleted]
bedroom_jabroni 22d ago
Quick, somebody back up the WP Plugins repository.
CqtGLRGcukpy 22d ago
Bypass paywall at either https://web.archive.org/web/20260909213058/https://www.404media.co/wordpress-automattic-ceo-matt-mullenweg-put-on-leave-of-absence/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260909213058/https://www.404me... or https://archive.ph/7J5TB https://archive.ph/7J5TB. https://www.theverge.com/tech/993022/wordpress-automattic-ceo-matt-mullenweg-leave-of-absence https://www.theverge.com/tech/993022/wordpress-automattic-ce... also has a writeup which takes some quotes from the article (and a statement by Automattic).
qarl 22d ago
If the board is going behind his back... then how does he know he was put on leave?
doodlebugging 22d ago
[flagged]
dramm 22d ago
I am surprised it has taken the Automattic board so long, just don't understand that.
deleted 22d ago
[deleted]
junon 22d ago
Finally.
bravetraveler 22d ago
Enforced by checkboxes on every login form, no doubt. Less sarcastically: I hope his corporate access is thoroughly controlled; we've seen him in 'full force', before. Article says no change for .org... this will almost surely become interesting.
gregjw 22d ago
Finally
munificent 22d ago
> 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 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.
- bredren 22d ago
  I like how somehow this was the final straw.
  - eclipticplane 22d ago
    Maybe he forgot to submit his PTO into Workday.
- throwup238 22d ago
  Many Burning Man guides, including the original arctic monkey guide that I first read about 20 years ago, specifically warn against making any life altering decisions for weeks after Burning Man. Decompression is a bitch when coming down from half a dozen psychedelics.
  - phrotoma 21d ago
    Well shit. I'm a huge fan of the band Artic Monkeys but I know nothing about festival guides. Is there a connection?
    - flobosg 21d ago
      No. In this case “Arctic Monkey” is just the pseudonym used by the guide writer.
  - prox 21d ago
    I have seen way too many people in my surroundings go off their rockers after too many ayahuasca trips, especially if they do it in a short time frame, they get emotionally unregulated.
mrcwinn 22d ago
This is fantastic news. Matt is an ass and unfit to lead a small HOA, let alone a company and open source project.
- mstkllah 21d ago
  Hearing stories about HOA as a non-US person I think he is actually quite suited leading one.
jrflowers 22d ago
> 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. HN needs to allow some html in comments so we can put ‘lmao’ in <blink> and <marquee> tags
kffkfkgj 22d ago
[dead]
c16 22d ago
They should have voted on if pineapple deserves to be on pizza while they were at it. The guy had to go.
moomoo11 22d ago
pro tip: don’t go public. don’t get a board. maintain full control.
ablation 22d ago
Long overdue. Matt needs to get some professional help or support, some of his actions have been incredibly harmful to the WordPress community.
stef25 21d ago
Breaking news big tech guy gets to do nothing and still get paid
doubletwoyou 21d ago
Good riddance! His neurotic public harassment of anyone who is remotely aligned against him (cf. Tumblr moderation and AspirePress) is simply childish and leaves much to be desired. His behaviour has shown him to be unfit to be a CEO.
radicalbyte 21d ago
Oh that's who Mullenweg is? I had a bit of an argument with him on one of the socials, I was making the argument that Zuck has very much jumped the shark but he seemed to be a big fan. He didn't have particularly good arguments though, given the abject failure to create anything interesting since the original Facebook site (they've been making also-ran clones before buying the competition OR going into new markets and failing since the early 2010s). He has obviously ran the core money machine ruthlessly once he won social.
zerof1l 21d ago
Hopefully, WP will get better. At the moment, WP itself, its ecosystem, and community are such a cesspool. It should not be used for anything more than just basic blogging. Even then, there are better alternatives. Especially in this day and age, when an AI model can easily write you what you need. It can write you something better than the trash adware on the plugin/theme store.
timbooktwo 21d ago
The more I see, the more convinced I am that Silicon Valley was actually a documentary.
joeblubaugh 21d ago
At least he’s going out with class
Simulacra 21d ago
After reading about his behavior over the past couple of years, I'm sad that it took this long. He has far too much hostility for the community to continue.
dallen33 21d ago
[flagged]
- z5br 21d ago
  [flagged]
dayvid 21d ago
Wordpress was an amazing piece of software. They could have a future in the AI era which has a similar issue in standardizing content managing platforms, but what a fumble. And over something with such a small moat as a hosting platform for businesses.
deleted 21d ago
[deleted]
gui_azeredo 21d ago
I read a lot of people saying so many things about Matt from the outside. As an Automattician for 9 years now, what I see from the inside is the best work environment I've ever been part of, and the best I've heard of compared to what colleagues describe at other big tech companies. Automattic is the most diverse and fair company I've seen, with an open and transparent culture. He might not be perfect, but all of this was created under his leadership. That starts with a genuinely unique hiring process that lets the company find people who fit well, and it extends to the way he delegates to leaders below him so they can do their best, while still letting anyone, in any position, share their thoughts on anything. On top of that, there are all his contributions to open source, alongside the products and services under Automattic's umbrella. I'm not sure what the intentions are behind the attacks on him, but I know from my experience that they aren't fair.
- xboxnolifes 21d ago
  > I'm not sure what the intentions are behind the attacks on him, but I know from my experience that they aren't fair. The entire saga is easily discoverable through an internet search. If you care to learn, you can read about it pretty easily.
throwaway9010 21d ago
[flagged]
- ferfumarma 21d ago
  > The situation is obviously more complex than any of us know, and I'd encourage everyone to be a bit more positive and supportive of a fellow founder and builder. What is your basis for this claim? His actions and behavior are publicly visible, and I can't even imagine a hidden context that would justify how he has acted.
- ImPostingOnHN 19d ago
  It's so weird how all your posts show absolutely no consideration or praise for anyone except Matt. Like everyone else in the world is an NPC whose perspective can be ignored or overruled by this one dude.
zackerist 21d ago
Give the guy a break. So much jealousy waiting to be poured out into word of hate. Says far more about you than it does about him.
stasomatic 21d ago
Who uses WP outside of legacy installs? I used to love it 15 or so years ago for side hustle work, but over time it gained weight and vulnerabilities, whack-a-mole. Plug-ins were nice, but that <?php...> inlining wasn't. I don't hate PHP, the things were just clumsy and messy inside the loop and I wasn't smart enough. What's the replacement these days in case I need to set up something simple quickly? Not Square Space or Shopify, although those are good products imo.
- ubermonkey 21d ago
  A huge chunk of the web is WP.
sjs382 21d ago
He's really tweeting through it today: https://xcancel.com/photomatt/with_replies https://xcancel.com/photomatt/with_replies From a quick scan of his recent tweets, https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenwegs-messages-went-missing-amid-a-failed-backup-and-two-lost-devices-court-filing-reveals https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenwegs-messages-wen... might answer the "why now?" of this.
- ValentineC 21d ago
  Thanks for this. I try not to waste my time on WordPress drama anymore, but it's sad reading his tweets from today and thinking how someone I used to respect for supposedly being kind and generous (or just good at writing well to get what he wants) has fallen so far.
- qlte 21d ago
  Man, in a thread he links to his tweet from 2024 that mentions using disappearing messages on Signal which the WPEngine lawyers are now using against him. So many people (including DannyBee, himself a lawyer) were telling him on HN how opposing counsel would be analyzing every post looking for any kind of angle to give them an edge, and it was very much in his best interest to step away from his computer. But, in reply he said his own lawyers said it was fine so no big deal... EDIT: also his bright pink X profile image is abusing HDR to make it extra annoyingly bright and the rest of my screen dim on my phone. Very off-putting behavior but pretty on character.
adamziel 21d ago
I’ve been at Automattic since 2018. Reading this thread, I wanted to share a story. In 2022, Matt supported me and my work on WordPress Playground [1]. Playground was in its early days and most people were still questioning whether it did anything useful. I got skepticism from peers, social media, even from my direct lead at the time. Not from Matt. He encouraged me, promoted Playground, created an environment where I could build a team around it, and encouraged us to always open-source more and more for the community. Since then, Playground has matured, grown in popularity, and sparked other great open-source work [2][3][4][5]. Now it’s 2026, and Playground helps a lot of people every day. And that wouldn’t have happened without Matt. No company is perfect. I’m just grateful to be part of one that values open-source so, so much. Automattic has been around 21 years now. It must have spent dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars on building free, open source software! And everything have changed so much during those 21 years: The industry, the VC landscape, the prices of hardware. Every incentive to go closed-source is there, and yet Automattic is still doubling down on open-source. I think that’s pretty amazing, and I’m grateful to Matt for staying true to those values. Anyway, that's the story. Take care of yourselves, everyone! [1] https://wordpress.org/playground/ https://wordpress.org/playground/ [2] https://wordpress.com/studio/ https://wordpress.com/studio/ [3] https://github.com/WordPress/sqlite-database-integration https://github.com/WordPress/sqlite-database-integration [4] https://github.com/WordPress/php-toolkit/ https://github.com/WordPress/php-toolkit/ [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378305
- ivraatiems 21d ago
  Thanks for sharing your story. How do you feel about the more recent behavior, though - the WP engine lawsuit, the buyout, etc.? Does that align with the person you saw and knew back then?
  - deleted 21d ago
    [deleted]
- chorlo 21d ago
  Couldn't agree more.
rtiodev 21d ago
I run payments engineering at Automattic, on the WooCommerce side. Speaking for myself. The company statement is on TechCrunch. Mark Davies, the CFO, is interim CEO, and Mary Hubbard told TechCrunch that WordPress.org is unaffected. I won't guess at the board's reasons. Nothing about how my teams ship has changed since the news broke. The repos are public if you want to watch. I've worked under Matt for years and I'm grateful for the company he built. People can argue about the rest.
deleted 21d ago
[deleted]
tosti 21d ago
Towards the end it says "Mullenweng"

458 points by LeoPanthera 22d ago

This is likely how they pull out of the disasterous legal actions Mullenweg has taken.

Shank 22d ago

> “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.” 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 will lead to that outcome.

SaltyBackendGuy 22d ago
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.
- datakan 22d ago
  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. Had a CISO leave for "personal" reasons. Talked to him a couple years later and yeah, he was fired. 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.
  - actionfromafar 22d ago
    Ah, but they take the big risks, you see. Someone has to do it.
  - gottorf 22d ago
    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. 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.
    - consp 22d ago
      I would argue there is a broad difference in ethicality and reason between the bottom and top of the food chain, making these examples less clear cut. If your plan as a low level employee doesn't work out you still get fired and the consequences are far greater.
    - DemocracyFTW2 22d ago
      > I don't think stealing $20 makes the local news these days https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_Emmely https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_Emmely Got fired because she redeemed two orphaned bottle deposit slips worth 1,30€ (in 2009, so more like 1,50€ in today's money /s). Caused a nation-wide discussion.
      - ZiiS 21d ago
        It was the being fired that made the news; not the stealing.
      - phonon 21d ago
        I don't think anything will beat https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/15148829 https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/15148829 School principal fired and loses $130k pension for overfilling coffee (about 50 cents).
- patternMachine 22d ago
  Barring truly bad behavior this is how executives get fired.
- tibbydudeza 22d ago
  Spend more time with my family :).
- telotortium 22d ago
  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.
  - adw 22d ago
    Fidji Simo has well documented chronic health issues so there’s no reason to assume that the ostensible and actual reasoning are far apart there.
    - telotortium 22d ago
      But the fact that she went on leave just as it became clear that Anthropic looked to be hitting escape velocity is suspicious, although not dispositive. When she was hired, her health issues also stopped her from coming into the office, but she still worked from home.
  - hodgesrm 22d ago
    People go on leave regularly for health reasons, and Fidji Simo has been quite open about her health. Unless you have evidence of your claim, the official explanation is simplest. That's especially the case here since firing someone on health leave can expose you to lawsuits under labor law in the US and many other countries.
- recursivegirth 22d ago
  Like sama? (Hope I don't get dang'ed for being political, especially against a ycombi founder...)
- 0xbadcafebee 22d ago
  Firing a CEO makes your company look bad. Even if you are firing them, you don't say you're firing them.
- a012 22d ago
  See his other comments in HN in the previous wp “incident”, simply said he _is_ nut
  - photomatt 22d ago
    [flagged]
    - rrherr 21d ago
      Hello matt this is your lawyer speaking. I am advising you today to please keep posting this shit
      - deleted 21d ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 21d ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 21d ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 21d ago
        [deleted]
      - 12_throw_away 21d ago
        I'm just posting to say hi to the various paralegals and clerks putting together their exhibits in the case. Hope you're having a good one!
- discopicante 21d ago
  Executives do not get fired like other employees. They have contracts that usually prevent standard dismissal unless they have done something illegal. When they are 'fired', they are still a protected class. Hence the narrative spin: a new 'ceremonial' role, spending time with family, etc. etc. Make no mistake, he has been fired. It just looks different than a call with HR or a manager and office security telling you to pack up your $hit and leave.
dofm 22d 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 22d 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 22d 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.
lukestevens 22d ago
Who knows, maybe he can try and blackmail them too[0] to get his way. It's worked out great so far. [0] https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt#102-wp-engine-files-suit-against-matt-and-automattic https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt#102-wp-engine-fi...
jongjong 22d ago
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. 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.
- fwip 21d ago
  It seems that the typical CEO has enough yes-men that it bruises their ego to have anyone suggest that they aren't great in any respect.
neya 22d ago
I think his recent screwing over of that custom fields plugin team and cutting off access to the plugins repo for WPengine was really a dumb move that has lead him to where he is now.
kakwa_ 22d ago
You very rarely fire execs these days, the main reason being you don't want them to sue the company over their loss of reputation. You want to keep-up appearances and leave some plausible deniability, even if it's generally BS.
Wowfunhappy 21d ago
> If you’re doing this type of accusation [...] odds are you’re never coming back. [...] Crashing out and waging war on the board will lead to that outcome. ...one exception comes to my mind, and it's Steve Jobs. Probably a total outlier case, but, still.
- domador 20d ago
  It Jobs a long time to come back, though, and it looks like he had to prove himself (as a businessman) in other ways while he was in exile. The board seems to have been filled with different people at the time it came back. It's probably much harder to come back under the same board with the same people, and it doesn't sound like Jobs was an exception to that aspect.
ChrisMarshallNY 21d ago
Sounds like it's something that must have been painful, all around. Boards really don't like doing things like this, as it signals instability, and shareholders hate instability. That's why so many boards leave clearly non-optimal CEOs in place, so often. This is not something that has been a focus of my attention, except when it was shoved into my face. I'm really too old for that kind of agita. I do run a couple of WP sites. I'm considering switching a couple to static sites, (via a generator, or maybe LLM-generated static sites), but I need one of them to remain WP (for now), as that hosts my blog.
- pwillia7 21d ago
  Just vibe code your own mini cms on top of your static site. Seriously though, I did this recently with mine and have had great results. It's not a Gutenberg WP experience, more like a decapCMS kind of thing.
  - boutell 21d ago
    There are quite a few CMSes that do static builds natively. If you hand one of those to Claude Code, you can get a more flexible and maintainable result more quickly. You can also point Claude Code to a CMS starter project in folder A And a vibe coded static site in folder B and pull them together. That being said... if you're the sole author of your site, anything goes and yeah, you probably don't need a proper CMS. I certainly built my own share of 100-line Perl static site builders back in the day.
  - eloisant 21d ago
    It's easier to generate a static site using a WP hidden behind a VPN than building a mini cms on top of a static site.
- jcarrano 21d ago
  My impression was that the major argument against static site generators is the unfriendly UX for non-technical contributors to the site, and with LLMs that problem is completely solved.
cebert 21d ago
I don’t have any skin in the game with this, and I don’t use WP. It appears Matt needs help right now. I don’t think he’s reacting rationally based on what he’s posting online or allegedly inside his former organization. I don’t know him, but it’s hard seeing people in a difficult time who need help.
sidewndr46 21d ago
This doesn't really sound like an accusation. It sounds like fact. It'd probably hold up under a deposition in a courtroom. I really don't think the board has any reason to even dispute this account of events.
fwip 21d ago
Matt "photomatt" Mullenweg is fundamentally incapable of not crashing out. It's very predictable for anyone at all familiar with the WPEngine saga, or slightly earlier, his personal beef with Tumblr user predstrogen (which involved him following her off of Tumblr after he banned her to harass her on Twitter).

_fw 22d ago

I briefly worked in the web agency SaaS space and hoooo boy, I have never known a more gossipy or dramatic industry. That’s not to pass comment either way on Mullenweg It’s just WordPress folk are nuts.

ramon156 22d ago

Reminds me of the first season of Succession

turnsontv 22d ago
[dead]
- 3stacks 22d ago
  based and bookpilled

hermitcrab 22d ago

>Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.” What is wrong with these people?

wmf 22d ago
That's how you can tell the article isn't giving you the full picture.
gkoberger 22d ago
I was curious what this meant, so I looked into it. They asked Automatic.css to change their name: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1omrtrk/automattic_wants_a_popular_framework_called/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1omrtrk/automatt... Automatic.css is a paid CSS framework specifically for WordPress. Legally speaking I have no opinion here, but I don't think it's as out-of-pocket as it sounds.
- hermitcrab 22d ago
  The article linked ( https://www.404media.co/automattic-automatic-trademark-matt-mullenweg-kevin-geary/ https://www.404media.co/automattic-automatic-trademark-matt-... ) is behind a paywall. But reading https://www.searchenginejournal.com/automattic-disputes-use-of-word-automatic-for-wordpress-product/560353/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/automattic-disputes-use-... it sounds like the claim 'Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic"' might not be accurate.
  - notahacker 22d ago
    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 for a third party commercial service specifically designed to customise Automattic's product to adopt seems to be at the reasonable end of trademark disputes...
- BeetleB 22d ago
  [flagged]

bellowsgulch 22d ago

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. In the mean time, if you're unable to derisk Mullenweg out of your business stack, this is a good first step.

SwellJoe 22d ago
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.
- pathartl 22d ago
  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.
  - SwellJoe 22d ago
    Sure, but, even with AI and the technical competence to steer it, it's still a pretty big lift to switch from, e.g. WordPress with billing and various other stuff to some ad hoc other thing. Even when I decided I was done with managing content in WordPress and moved it out to a Hugo static site for my company website, I still kept the commerce stuff in WordPress just because it works and we know it works from a decade or so of operation. I'm certainly not deploying new WordPress sites, partly because of how weird and hostile Mullenweg has made the WordPress ecosystem for no good reason. I don't even necessarily disagree with the sentiments behind his words and actions, but the methods and how far it's gone in terms of lawfare is just silly and destructive. Anyway, they won't get decades like Oracle has gotten. But, they've got a few years of comfy margins ahead if they don't blow it up too badly.

nubinetwork 22d ago

[flagged]

gkoberger 22d ago

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. 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). WordPress has been his life for 23 years. Doing the same thing for 23 years likely makes it difficult to have a proper perspective.

biglyburrito 22d ago
"Unfortunately"??
- gkoberger 22d ago
  "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.
  - solarkraft 22d ago
    Automattic also bought Tumblr and Pocket Casts, publishing the code of the latter. I used to have a subscription just to support them.
    - dofm 22d ago
      And Simplenote.
      - joelanman 22d ago
        Which is no longer in active development https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195093

dcrazy 22d ago

I guess when people vote the same way, it’s technically a conspiracy?

biglyburrito 22d ago
No, it's called "voting".
- dcrazy 22d ago
  That was my point. My sarcasm mustn’t have come through.
antonvs 22d ago
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.

garbagepatch 22d ago

Here is the whole saga until May 2025: https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7fc225d https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...

pluc 22d ago
https://mullenweg.wtf/ https://mullenweg.wtf/ picked up after that
adrienne 22d ago
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.
- classictraffic 22d ago
  Hope you’re doing better these days!
graemep 21d ago
That lead me to a number of good sources, especially this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/24/automattic-vs-wp-engine/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/24/automattic-vs-wp-engine/ which links to a lot more I already knew Matt was throwing a tantrum and refusing to address conflicts of interest. However WP Engine also do not come out of it looking good. Nor do a lot of people in the WP community. Matt is a problem, but it does not look like he is the only problem.
- toyg 21d ago
  The Wordpress community got so big, that inevitably it attracted leeches. Unfortunately, Matt chose to address a home-infestation problem with a firethrower.
  - graemep 21d ago
    Great way to put it. Ignoring collateral damage too.

solarkraft 22d ago

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. 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. I’m a bit surprised they didn’t pull the plug earlier given they could have. Hasn’t he already caused vast damage? 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.

ValentineC 22d ago

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.

ojame 22d ago
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%. 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.
- angry_octet 22d ago
  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.
  - Onavo 22d ago
    > If he wants that level of control he would need to take the company private, and various investor agreements probably prevent this. Since when was Automatic a public listed company?
    - angry_octet 22d ago
      I should have said: establish sole ownership.
    - gkanai 22d ago
      It is not. They did take VC funding however, which is when the board and the investor agreements came into force.

ChoosesBarbecue 22d ago

I am so curious why now, what changed? The WPEngine saga was started two years ago.

minimaxir 22d ago
It never ended.
- ChoosesBarbecue 22d ago
  Touché, reworded it to be clearer on what I meant :).
nikcub 22d ago
from my own observations: 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. 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. wordpress and automattic haven't responded to this well, at all. at times it is often straight denial. 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
- gpm 22d ago
  How is the WPEngine case going anyways? Glancing at the docket [1] in an attempt to answer this myself... looks like the trial is scheduled for a bit over a year from now [2].. A ton of fighting over discovery... a motion asking for fairly monster sanctions for spoilation of evidence [3] (to be argued on the 30th). Claiming in [3] with what appear to be pretty solid receipts (as far as we can see through the redactions anyways) that Matt was willfully destroying communications related to the case and subject to the discovery - and Automattic's lawyers lied to the court that they preserved them (naturally Automattic's lawyers have a reply with an entirely different interpretation of events if you go look for it... but at least at a glance WPEngine seems more convincing). [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/wpengine-inc-v-automattic-inc/?filed_after=&filed_before=&entry_gte=&entry_lte=&order_by=desc https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/wpengine-inc-v... [2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.437474/gov.uscourts.cand.437474.371.2.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43... [3] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.437474/gov.uscourts.cand.437474.357.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

reticulates 22d ago

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. Here is Matt talking about his control: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150

pluc 22d ago
I'd definitely take away his access having seen how vindictive he has been throughout the WPE saga, for everyone's sake
Spinfusor 22d ago
If he has 84% voting share, can't he just fire the board?
- chris_wot 22d ago
  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. 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.
  - FreakLegion 22d ago
    > While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board This is very unlikely. True Ventures almost certainly controls at least one seat. (Until Phil Black left last year they actually held two seats, but that doesn't mean they had the right to. Either way, at the moment it's just Toni Schneider.)

tibbydudeza 22d ago

Finally.

0xDEADBEEFCAFE 22d ago

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.

minimaxir 22d ago
The entire saga started due to WP Engine "forking" WordPress.
- 0xDEADBEEFCAFE 22d ago
  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..
  - nixosbestos 22d ago
    Matt, ... just log out and take a break.
  - garbagepatch 22d ago
    Matt, you shouldn't have picked a FLOSS license if you didn't intend for the software to be FLOSS in the first place.
  - sehansen 21d ago
    If they'd done those two things Wordpress would probably have been far less successful. Which certainly is a way of making WP Engine not even want to do what they did. Heck, they would probably not even exist.
- kmeisthax 22d ago
  WP Engine's "forking" consisted of disabling the revisions feature by default. 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.

echoangle 22d ago

> Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.” Real austin powers vibes > He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark.

variaga 22d ago
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. Which is not the same thing as claiming the word automatic generally. Personally it sounds like a loser if they took it to court since (a) automatic is 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.
ifahimreza 22d ago
they own automatic.com right?

josefritzishere 22d ago

The best line was buried at the bottom. Did Automattic really attempt to claim it owns the word “automatic?

Freak_NL 22d ago
This is better explained elsewhere in this thread, but it boils down to a totally valid trademark dispute over a company calling itself Automatic.css which supplies services for WordPress installs.

pier25 22d ago

It's impressive this took so long.

InsideOutSanta 22d ago
I had the opposite thought: I'm impressed the board did anything at all, given how useless they are at most companies.

deleted 22d ago

[deleted]

bedroom_jabroni 22d ago

Quick, somebody back up the WP Plugins repository.

CqtGLRGcukpy 22d ago

Bypass paywall at either https://web.archive.org/web/20260909213058/https://www.404media.co/wordpress-automattic-ceo-matt-mullenweg-put-on-leave-of-absence/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260909213058/https://www.404me... or https://archive.ph/7J5TB https://archive.ph/7J5TB. https://www.theverge.com/tech/993022/wordpress-automattic-ceo-matt-mullenweg-leave-of-absence https://www.theverge.com/tech/993022/wordpress-automattic-ce... also has a writeup which takes some quotes from the article (and a statement by Automattic).

qarl 22d ago

If the board is going behind his back... then how does he know he was put on leave?

doodlebugging 22d ago

[flagged]

dramm 22d ago

I am surprised it has taken the Automattic board so long, just don't understand that.

deleted 22d ago

[deleted]

junon 22d ago

Finally.

bravetraveler 22d ago

Enforced by checkboxes on every login form, no doubt. Less sarcastically: I hope his corporate access is thoroughly controlled; we've seen him in 'full force', before. Article says no change for .org... this will almost surely become interesting.

gregjw 22d ago

Finally

munificent 22d ago

> 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 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.

bredren 22d ago
I like how somehow this was the final straw.
- eclipticplane 22d ago
  Maybe he forgot to submit his PTO into Workday.
throwup238 22d ago
Many Burning Man guides, including the original arctic monkey guide that I first read about 20 years ago, specifically warn against making any life altering decisions for weeks after Burning Man. Decompression is a bitch when coming down from half a dozen psychedelics.
- phrotoma 21d ago
  Well shit. I'm a huge fan of the band Artic Monkeys but I know nothing about festival guides. Is there a connection?
  - flobosg 21d ago
    No. In this case “Arctic Monkey” is just the pseudonym used by the guide writer.
- prox 21d ago
  I have seen way too many people in my surroundings go off their rockers after too many ayahuasca trips, especially if they do it in a short time frame, they get emotionally unregulated.

mrcwinn 22d ago

This is fantastic news. Matt is an ass and unfit to lead a small HOA, let alone a company and open source project.

mstkllah 21d ago
Hearing stories about HOA as a non-US person I think he is actually quite suited leading one.

jrflowers 22d ago

> 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. HN needs to allow some html in comments so we can put ‘lmao’ in <blink> and <marquee> tags

kffkfkgj 22d ago

[dead]

c16 22d ago

They should have voted on if pineapple deserves to be on pizza while they were at it. The guy had to go.

moomoo11 22d ago

pro tip: don’t go public. don’t get a board. maintain full control.

ablation 22d ago

Long overdue. Matt needs to get some professional help or support, some of his actions have been incredibly harmful to the WordPress community.

stef25 21d ago

Breaking news big tech guy gets to do nothing and still get paid

doubletwoyou 21d ago

Good riddance! His neurotic public harassment of anyone who is remotely aligned against him (cf. Tumblr moderation and AspirePress) is simply childish and leaves much to be desired. His behaviour has shown him to be unfit to be a CEO.

radicalbyte 21d ago

Oh that's who Mullenweg is? I had a bit of an argument with him on one of the socials, I was making the argument that Zuck has very much jumped the shark but he seemed to be a big fan. He didn't have particularly good arguments though, given the abject failure to create anything interesting since the original Facebook site (they've been making also-ran clones before buying the competition OR going into new markets and failing since the early 2010s). He has obviously ran the core money machine ruthlessly once he won social.

zerof1l 21d ago

Hopefully, WP will get better. At the moment, WP itself, its ecosystem, and community are such a cesspool. It should not be used for anything more than just basic blogging. Even then, there are better alternatives. Especially in this day and age, when an AI model can easily write you what you need. It can write you something better than the trash adware on the plugin/theme store.

timbooktwo 21d ago

The more I see, the more convinced I am that Silicon Valley was actually a documentary.

joeblubaugh 21d ago

At least he’s going out with class

Simulacra 21d ago

After reading about his behavior over the past couple of years, I'm sad that it took this long. He has far too much hostility for the community to continue.

dallen33 21d ago

[flagged]

z5br 21d ago
[flagged]

dayvid 21d ago

Wordpress was an amazing piece of software. They could have a future in the AI era which has a similar issue in standardizing content managing platforms, but what a fumble. And over something with such a small moat as a hosting platform for businesses.

deleted 21d ago

[deleted]

gui_azeredo 21d ago

I read a lot of people saying so many things about Matt from the outside. As an Automattician for 9 years now, what I see from the inside is the best work environment I've ever been part of, and the best I've heard of compared to what colleagues describe at other big tech companies. Automattic is the most diverse and fair company I've seen, with an open and transparent culture. He might not be perfect, but all of this was created under his leadership. That starts with a genuinely unique hiring process that lets the company find people who fit well, and it extends to the way he delegates to leaders below him so they can do their best, while still letting anyone, in any position, share their thoughts on anything. On top of that, there are all his contributions to open source, alongside the products and services under Automattic's umbrella. I'm not sure what the intentions are behind the attacks on him, but I know from my experience that they aren't fair.

xboxnolifes 21d ago
> I'm not sure what the intentions are behind the attacks on him, but I know from my experience that they aren't fair. The entire saga is easily discoverable through an internet search. If you care to learn, you can read about it pretty easily.

throwaway9010 21d ago

[flagged]

ferfumarma 21d ago
> The situation is obviously more complex than any of us know, and I'd encourage everyone to be a bit more positive and supportive of a fellow founder and builder. What is your basis for this claim? His actions and behavior are publicly visible, and I can't even imagine a hidden context that would justify how he has acted.
ImPostingOnHN 19d ago
It's so weird how all your posts show absolutely no consideration or praise for anyone except Matt. Like everyone else in the world is an NPC whose perspective can be ignored or overruled by this one dude.

zackerist 21d ago

Give the guy a break. So much jealousy waiting to be poured out into word of hate. Says far more about you than it does about him.

stasomatic 21d ago

Who uses WP outside of legacy installs? I used to love it 15 or so years ago for side hustle work, but over time it gained weight and vulnerabilities, whack-a-mole. Plug-ins were nice, but that <?php...> inlining wasn't. I don't hate PHP, the things were just clumsy and messy inside the loop and I wasn't smart enough. What's the replacement these days in case I need to set up something simple quickly? Not Square Space or Shopify, although those are good products imo.

ubermonkey 21d ago
A huge chunk of the web is WP.

sjs382 21d ago

He's really tweeting through it today: https://xcancel.com/photomatt/with_replies https://xcancel.com/photomatt/with_replies From a quick scan of his recent tweets, https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenwegs-messages-went-missing-amid-a-failed-backup-and-two-lost-devices-court-filing-reveals https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenwegs-messages-wen... might answer the "why now?" of this.

ValentineC 21d ago
Thanks for this. I try not to waste my time on WordPress drama anymore, but it's sad reading his tweets from today and thinking how someone I used to respect for supposedly being kind and generous (or just good at writing well to get what he wants) has fallen so far.
qlte 21d ago
Man, in a thread he links to his tweet from 2024 that mentions using disappearing messages on Signal which the WPEngine lawyers are now using against him. So many people (including DannyBee, himself a lawyer) were telling him on HN how opposing counsel would be analyzing every post looking for any kind of angle to give them an edge, and it was very much in his best interest to step away from his computer. But, in reply he said his own lawyers said it was fine so no big deal... EDIT: also his bright pink X profile image is abusing HDR to make it extra annoyingly bright and the rest of my screen dim on my phone. Very off-putting behavior but pretty on character.

adamziel 21d ago

I’ve been at Automattic since 2018. Reading this thread, I wanted to share a story. In 2022, Matt supported me and my work on WordPress Playground [1]. Playground was in its early days and most people were still questioning whether it did anything useful. I got skepticism from peers, social media, even from my direct lead at the time. Not from Matt. He encouraged me, promoted Playground, created an environment where I could build a team around it, and encouraged us to always open-source more and more for the community. Since then, Playground has matured, grown in popularity, and sparked other great open-source work [2][3][4][5]. Now it’s 2026, and Playground helps a lot of people every day. And that wouldn’t have happened without Matt. No company is perfect. I’m just grateful to be part of one that values open-source so, so much. Automattic has been around 21 years now. It must have spent dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars on building free, open source software! And everything have changed so much during those 21 years: The industry, the VC landscape, the prices of hardware. Every incentive to go closed-source is there, and yet Automattic is still doubling down on open-source. I think that’s pretty amazing, and I’m grateful to Matt for staying true to those values. Anyway, that's the story. Take care of yourselves, everyone! [1] https://wordpress.org/playground/ https://wordpress.org/playground/ [2] https://wordpress.com/studio/ https://wordpress.com/studio/ [3] https://github.com/WordPress/sqlite-database-integration https://github.com/WordPress/sqlite-database-integration [4] https://github.com/WordPress/php-toolkit/ https://github.com/WordPress/php-toolkit/ [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378305

ivraatiems 21d ago
Thanks for sharing your story. How do you feel about the more recent behavior, though - the WP engine lawsuit, the buyout, etc.? Does that align with the person you saw and knew back then?
- deleted 21d ago
  [deleted]
chorlo 21d ago
Couldn't agree more.

rtiodev 21d ago

I run payments engineering at Automattic, on the WooCommerce side. Speaking for myself. The company statement is on TechCrunch. Mark Davies, the CFO, is interim CEO, and Mary Hubbard told TechCrunch that WordPress.org is unaffected. I won't guess at the board's reasons. Nothing about how my teams ship has changed since the news broke. The repos are public if you want to watch. I've worked under Matt for years and I'm grateful for the company he built. People can argue about the rest.

deleted 21d ago

[deleted]

tosti 21d ago

Towards the end it says "Mullenweng"