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Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster
- xnx 21d agoDoes Matt own >50%? If so, the board is irrelevant. If not, I assume he would've been gone long ago.
- robocat 21d agoYou don't know what contracts he has signed. VCs typically include clauses to be able to sack CEO and retain board control under specific circumstances. I've seen this happen in a small company I was at, to a CEO that didn't meet rather ambitious financial targets. AFAIK it is all very carefully designed and the power is extremely important to VCs, plus the legalities are well tested (since most losing CEOs will fight it in courtroom).
- minimaxir 21d agoDiscussion on the ouster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283
- eclipticplane 21d agoI'm just glad to have my last projects off of Wordpress to get to no longer care about drama at Automattic that seems to never end.
- autophagian 21d agoHas very little to do with the current brou-ha-ha, but I just realised its “Automattic” because his name is “Matt”. It’s like a veil over the world has been lifted.
- Hamuko 21d agoAt least his egotrips make a bit more sense after you realise it.
- layer8 21d agoIt feels like I see this comment in every single Automattic thread on HN. :)
- vjvjvjvjghv 21d agoThat’s fast! It usually takes me decades, if ever, to figure out this stuff. One of the downsides being slightly autistic and taking everything too literal
- moritzwarhier 21d agoAlso noticed it because of this comment chain. Not sure if it makes me autistic though, I mean, companies use wrong spellings all the time to differentiate, so often that I don't give much thought to it any more.
- dnautics 21d agoHasnt automattic been around for a decade?
- dpark 21d agoTwo decades. It was founded in 2005
- boothby 21d agoIt has, but I only learned about it when the drama started hitting HN recently. But since I learned about the guy and the company in the same headline I put two and two together right then and there. I've learned some suspicion of founders who name companies after themselves.
- rpdillon 21d agoYep, still can't get over how I missed the obvious arrow in the FedEx logo (it's embedded between the "E" and "x") for so many years. Super clever!
- jb1991 21d agoWait until you hear about the Beatles name.
- vjvjvjvjghv 21d ago
- benatkin 21d agoY combinator helped people notice it when they invested in a company called Automatic https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/automatic https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/automatic However now that it's been acquired that reminder of Automattic not being named Automatic is gone.
- YCisTrash 21d ago[flagged]
- refulgentis 21d agoI don't get it, why?
- brandall10 21d agoSomeone made the same comment in the thread from a few days back. Yeah, it was the first time I realized it as well.
- cwisecarver 21d agoRelevant: Kumail Nanjiani learns about Automattic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHcrispG_rc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHcrispG_rc
- tayloramurphy 21d agoThis is great. I'd never seen this clip before!
- autophagian 21d agoAstounding.
- ValentineC 21d agoI've never seen this, but that comment at the end is priceless.
- JonAtkinson 21d agoThis must be exhausting for the Automattic staff who just want to get on with their jobs.
- legitster 21d agoAnyone who wanted to get on with their jobs would have taken one of the buyouts. Everyone who still works there has to be committed to Matt.
- BobAliceInATree 21d agoChanging jobs can be rough or maybe even impossible in this job market. I'm sure there are many there that are not aligned with Matt, but just need the steady paycheck. Same was true after Elon took over twitter.
- threetonesun 21d agoApplying the word "impossible" to leaving a white collar job seems like a stretch. Also the buyout was almost 2 years ago now, anyone still there must be either in dire financial straits or quite commited.
- paul7986 21d agoThat's until you find yourself in this job market and you realize now how stupid the digital creation job market and overall jobs are. Once you get laid (off) you are now you're in a pile of 100(edit 1000s) other applicants equally qualified vying for the same job and then hundreds of thousands who can all type to Ai to do a job that once required knowledge & skill.
- zdragnar 21d agoOnly 100? Those are good odds in the current market...
- legitster 21d ago> WordPress founder and a key advocate for the open source community This should probably say self appointed advocate. He really hasn't advocated for much beyond collecting payments to Automattic.
- ibejoeb 21d agoI don't know... WordPress is a pretty huge open source project and community. He also opened Pocket Casts.
- miguelxpn 21d agoHe bought Pocket Casts.
- ibejoeb 21d agoThen released under the MPL
- stronglikedan 21d agoWas it open source before he bought it? If not, then he indeed opened it.
- legitster 21d agoIf you followed his months of mad ravings, he made it clear that Wordpress is not a true open source project. He has direct control over the project via Automattic appointments in the community, everything is designed to route through his circuitous network of shell corporations and trademarks (wordpress.org is fully under his control and he personally owns the Wordpress trademark - which the "project" licenses from him). The only reason Wordpress is open source in the first place is because it's a just a fork of b2/cafelog and the original GNU license means derivative works have to be open source as well. (Lost in his moral crusade against WP Engine is the fact that he never really contributed to b2 besides just taking their code).
- bedroom_jabroni 21d agoDamn it hasn't even been a week.
- figassis 21d agoIs it perhaps time to ackowledge that boards where everyone is buddies can't actually do their jobs, yet they get paid obscene amounts of money?
- iAMkenough 21d agoNo different than how the Cabinet of the United States operates.
- ooterness 21d agoIs it perhaps time to ackowledge that cabinets where everyone is buddies can't actually do their jobs, yet they get given obscene amounts of power?
- walrus01 21d agoDoesn't he control 84% of the voting stock or something? I'm curious how a board could even oust him in the first place. Or so he claims.
- jsnell 21d agoThe ability to appoint a board member doesn't mean you get to control their every decision. Nor is their fiduciary duty just one shareholder. Of course usually hand-picked boards don't go against their benefactor, and they're not keeping their seats. That they did in this case says something about just how bad the situation must be.
- phendrenad2 21d agoIt's really strange that a company with such a volatile owner would even have a board. But I guess minority shareholders demand it.
- jefftk 19d agoAutomattic is a Delaware corporation, so it's required to have a board.
- phendrenad2 19d agoRight, I'm confused about why at the first clash with the board the CEO didn't reform the company as a boardless LLC.
- everfrustrated 21d agoDepends on the rules of the company. Just because he can elect the board doesn't mean he gets to direct their every decision. They are supposed to have their own independent judgement. Depending on the company rules it is possible they might not be easily replaced during their term in which case they could do a coup in the short term.
- benatkin 21d agoIt would have been just a matter of time before he displayed his power with the nonprofit and wordpress.com which he controls personally, independently of the Automattic board. Maybe that is part of why the board gave him his control of Automattic back so quickly.
- VCFundedGenYer 21d agoWhen the CEO becomes a diva, the company has lost the plot.
- efficax 21d agoyou'd think that but at least one CEO has turned being an annoying diva into being the richest man in the world
- pluc 21d agoi'm gonna wait to hear it from the people who were saying yesterday they were in control if that's ok > As of yet, no one at Automattic has heard a confirmation from the board. Mark Davies’ Slack account was also deactivated, sources said. mhm, ok.
- chuckadams 21d agoDavies was supposedly the one who originally cooked up the whole extortion scheme against major players in the WP space. WPE was just the first target of many that were planned. Not that Matt is absolved in any way, but it'll be interesting to see what falls out if and when he throws Davies under the bus.
- pluc 21d agoThat'd be the first time I hear about that angle. Mullenweg was pretty public about why he was doing it and it never felt like it was someone else's idea, given his level of commitment. It would be smart to find a scapegoat if you want to stretch your tenure a few years though.
- chuckadams 21d agoI should probably emphasize "supposedly": I get my facts from the same news rags as everyone, and I at least skim the court filings. Matt has held personal grudges against WPE's leadership for much longer than this most recent affair, so it almost certainly wasn't entirely Davies' idea, might not even have originated with him. But when the CFO discusses at length then signs off on such a novel revenue scheme, that makes him a co-conspirator at least. Barring a settlement, I imagine more details will come out in open court.
- reticulates 21d agoYou give Matt far too much credit. Matt wouldn’t listen to Davies. Look at what happened to Automattic’s legal counsel, one HN comment that didn’t align with Matt’s world view and he was canned post haste. Davies perhaps explained to Matt how financially precarious Automattic’s position is but it seems very unlikely for a CFO to advocate for a batshit extortion plot that had no hope of success. Where did you hear that Davies was responsible for the extortion scheme? I haven’t seen that reported anywhere.
- lellow 21d agoToo much drama. Focus on the product and the users.
- ttul 21d agoMost surprising in this article is the vibrant HDR magenta circle on Matt’s Twitter.
- edoceo 21d agoWhat does that mean? Why is it a surprise?
- klausa 21d agoIt’s surprising that Twitter even supports that.
- danillonunes 21d agoSome old twitter users still have animated gif avatars that stop being supported years ago. Maybe their approach is to just stop supporting it for new avatars and grandfathering whoever manage to upload one before.
- ValentineC 21d agoI remember seeing that on his avatar since the early days of the WP Engine drama.
- nabbed 21d agoIt left a temporary spot in my vision after I scrolled it away.
- sillysaurusx 21d agoWhat is it about Automattic's structure that lets Matt stay in control? Even Travis got ousted at Uber, and he was the primary founder. Is the company set up in a way that makes removing Matt very difficult?
- manarth 21d agoHe controls roughly 84% of the share-stakeholder votes.
- reticulates 21d agoDon’t underestimate Matt’s disregard for corporate theatre. A board voting to remove a CEO isn’t like firing an employee, there’s an assumption that obviously the founder would not use their elevated access to retaliate. As noted, Matt controls the majority of the voting stock, but he also controls WordPress as a whole. Removing the founder who controls everything against their wishes is basically impossible. Even if removing his access to Automattic’s corporate systems was possible, it takes one “I’ll revoke Automattic’s license to use the WordPress.com domain” to convince the board to blink and Matt is back. Mutually assured destruction. The board probably underestimated just how petty Matt is. Travis, Altman, they’re egotistical but ultimately respect corporate theatre, they know that circumventing it is a bad idea, that one must participate in the grand performance, as Altman did. Matt doesn’t care, he’ll do as he pleases regardless of the consequences. If Matt was a rationale shareholder he would know that what he has done here is a death sentence for Automattic but alas he does not care. Matt will watch Automattic burn before he lets anyone usurp him. The irony is that as a supposed open source advocate, he’s harming open source, he’s showing how dangerous it is for investors to invest in the corporate arm of an open source project when the founder has absolute control over the project.
- bigbuppo 21d agoHopefully the board will call his bluff, except he'll overreact in the most him way, wordpress will die, and we can all get on with our lives because there is no more wordpress.
- ChallengeEup237 20d ago
- ebilgenius 21d ago> Mullenweg responded to our inquiry, saying a blog post is forthcoming. When it dropped, it was about him buying a houseboat.
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- edoceo 21d agoNot a good investment.
- WesolyKubeczek 21d agoIt's easily the quote of the month. And we are only halfway into the month.
- pluc 21d agoFrom yesterday (or two days 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.”
- legitster 21d agoTrue to form, he has already been on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt) and Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=photomatt https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=photomatt) to engage in comment wars.
- wang_li 21d agoThe new Derek Smart.
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- 12_throw_away 21d agoAnd this is why screenshots of HN comment threads keep showing up in federal court orders. (eg, page 24 of https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.437474/gov.uscourts.cand.437474.64.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43... )
- throwawaymatt 21d agoJust when we (the WP community) thought things were settling down and cooler heads might be prevailing... this happens. Uhg, not great for someone who has invested over 15 years into building with WP and does (paid) business with an Automattic company.
- mpweiher 21d agoTime for alternatives?
- throwawaymatt 21d agoThis drama started in April 2025 and there were replies to my comments here on HN telling me WordPress is "dead" and that the community would soon jump ship. Neither happened (not even remotely), and instead of switching to a different CMS we're just using (on new projects) WordPress as a pure CMS with custom/detached front ends because WordPress is still the best/most mature CMS. 99% of my clients that had WordPress, still have WordPress because small businesses move slow, and most of the "AI WordPress killers" are just glorified chatbots which well, if you've ever tried to manage a large site with a nondeterministic "AI chatbot"... it's obvious why.
- raverbashing 21d agoMakes me wonder if he really is back or the board just "forgot" to take his account offline
- jherdman 19d agoAs someone in the Rails community I deeply sympathize and understand where you're coming from.
- testycool 21d agoDid someone make a site to track the timeline of the new WordPress situation, like they did with the WP Engine one?
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- dbg31415 21d agoDirectus is great. And free for small organizations and non-profits. Just saying, there are plenty of good CMSs out there now. WordPress is junky AF, and the spat with WP Engine over... of all things... how they store backups... it was all so cringe. Felt like it boiled down to WP Engines saying, "We don't need to keep backups on the live server..." And WP saying, "Oh hell yeah you do, you can't have your own way to do rollbacks!" It was literally insane for them to fight about that.
- CodeWriter23 21d agoWhat an absolute clown show. I don't see how anyone can trust WordPress (the company) going forward.
- martin_drapeau 21d agoWhat relevance will WP have now that AI can build websites? I see more and more vertical SaaS vendors bundling website migration/building/hosting in their offering. I suspect they may steel away many customers from WP, Wix and competitors. What do you think?
- addaon 21d agoOne challenge is that if everyone uses AI to build their own websites, the security vulnerabilities will be different per site, which is very inconvenient if you want to compromise a huge number of sites simultaneously. It's possible that AI tools for exploiting websites scale to overcome this challenge, but it's going to be hard for AI to compete with Wordpress for security vulnerability density, uniformity, and cost.
- martin_drapeau 21d agoSure but a SaaS vendor already handle security for their own products which are typically dynamic website apps. I agree security is a concern for clients doing it themselves.
- paulrei 21d agoWordpress' security track record isn't great, but I'm worried whether it would be safer if everybody builds their own CMS using AI. Yes, as a general-purpose CMS it has more attack surface, but there are more people working to harden and fix it than for all the little diverse AI-generated sites. I'd love the diversity of everybody being able to build the sites they want, though. Perhaps we'll see more static HTML/CSS/JS pages. Update: I love the irony that I just saw the sibling post arguing in the exact opposite direction, that the diversity might make it harder to exploit web sites at scale. Which is also a good point.
- kvam 21d agoI really hate this company and how they operate. Key example, they sold a «lifetime» plan for Day One that was quite expensive. I used it a lot and went for it. After they saturated the market for lifetime buyers, they started launching new features not included for lifetime buyers. Annoying. Then they started pushing advertising for upgrading. Very annoying. Then they started taking away features lifetime plan users had already. Infuriating. Then they made it so that support was only available for users on a subscription plan. My complaints weren’t even answered. Unforgivable.
- ValentineC 21d agoDay One was acquired by Automattic in 2021 [1]. The move to a subscription model happened in 2017 [2]. [1]https://dayoneapp.com/blog/the-next-chapter-of-day-one-at-automattic/ https://dayoneapp.com/blog/the-next-chapter-of-day-one-at-au... [2] https://medium.com/day-one/day-one-goes-premium-424492fd0a5b https://medium.com/day-one/day-one-goes-premium-424492fd0a5b
- kvam 21d agoYes, yet the bulk of my issues outlined in the post were after that. Either they kept introducing even worse policies, or they allowed them
- Ozzie_osman 21d agoOne sequence here could be the Board fired him (as CEO), then he removed/replaced the Board (as main preferred shareholder). Either that or he somehow has control over IT and is just shit posting and controlling Slack.
- whalesalad 21d agoEverything that I know about Matt Mullenweg has been against my will.
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- joleyj 21d agoHow does he get that intense vibrant pink color on his Twitter profile pic? It looks illuminated. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a color that pops like that before.
- supermdguy 21d agoProbably has an HDR layer, kind of surprised social networks let that happen since it's really annoying imo. There was a discussion about it here a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49402521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49402521.
- iamleppert 21d agoAt this point someone should just make an API compatible clone so all the plugins, integrations, themes and such work and be done with Wordpress and all that muck around it. Can't be too hard these days with coding agents.
- pathartl 21d agoWP is GPL, just fork it.
- paulryanrogers 19d agoThere is ClassicPress
- tracerbulletx 21d agoI honestly think the founder of a project can do whatever they want and they don't have any obligation to anyone except maybe their co-founders and early major contributors (and in his case as a CEO his employees and investors). If its too annoying for you don't use or contribute to wordpress. Is it a strategic blunder to pressure a competitor using his project if it harms users, I mean it seems like it was? But im not taking sides with a hosting provider competing with the founder under almost any conditions related to their business choices, or forming some kind of personal opinion on the person based on it.
- m4rtink 21d agoSo a final nail to the Wordpress coffin then ?
- couldbeidk 21d ago[dead]
- keane 21d agoThere’s an old saying in Tennessee (I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee) that says “never strike a king unless you are sure you shall defeat him”. Bust in, guns in hand, and now find they’ve turned to sausages. (A tale as old as time.)
- MatthewORyan 19d agoLove the subtle nod to the W "fool me once" clip. One of the greatest of all time!
- 0xbadcafebee 21d agoI get that a lot of people are financially dependent on the ecosystem that is Wordpress. But it's a crappy piece of technology that needs overhauling. Is there any modern project designed to replace it with better code/architecture?
- askonomm 21d agoWhy is it that a lot of the rich and powerful people tend to become so childish? Or is it just more visible when rich and powerful people do that? Either way, it’s just cringe throwing tantrums like this.