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Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster

274 points by ilamont 14d ago

deleted 14d ago
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Grombobulous 14d ago
That’s a weird thing to say about “coup attempts.” Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight. In the world of AI I imagine that Automattic’s core business model is in turmoil.
- sva_ 14d ago
  > Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy? I think we've seen over an over again which one works and which one doesn't.
  - jmull 14d ago
    Is that a settled question? China isn't exactly struggling right now.
    - thaumasiotes 14d ago
      > China isn't exactly struggling right now. Have you asked people in China about this?
      - gverrilla 13d ago
        Support for the party is very strong.
        thaumasiotes 13d ago
        Boy, you're not right about that. Where'd you get the idea?
    - sva_ 14d ago
      If you look on Alibaba or AliExpress and see different companies competing and undercutting each others prices, I don't really see it as a planned economy.
      - dghlsakjg 14d ago
        I think a better term might be a “steered economy”. You see fierce competition in some very specific and preordained market areas. Lithium batteries, solar panels, electric cars, industrial and autonomous robots, AI. Now go look at the 5 year plan from Beijing. Green technology, robotics, mature node chips, and AI are the focuses. In other words, it isn’t a mistake that China dominates in the industries that it does.
      - throwup238 14d ago
        The CCP publishes their primary central planning mechanism for all to see. They just adopted the new 15th Five Year Plan in March [1]. There’s a whole bureaucracy just to coordinate the implementation at the sector, provincial, and corporate level driven by the State Council, NDRC, and NPC. Governments at all levels are involved with coming up with their own implementation plans to execute on the Five Year Plan. You can trace decades of Chinese industrial development to those plans but the Chinese system is very different from the Soviet central planning mechanism, which is why I think you’re misinterpreting Alibaba’s price competition. The CCP explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like Alibaba and the manufacturers on it to compete; that’s their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the five year plan instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but it’s very much there. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Five-Year_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Five-Year_Plan
        mitxela 13d ago
        If that's central planning then the USA is also centrally planned.
        throwup238 13d ago
    - edgyquant 14d ago
      China has succeeded so much by moving away from a planned economy when they were fully planned they were one of the poorest nations in the world. Most successful nations are mixed economies and yes, this is a settled question.
      - miyoji 14d ago
        Past performance is no indication of future success. It doesn't matter what's been successful in the past, these things can change. Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed and so did the narrative. None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.
        Kuxe 14d ago
        > Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was) According to whom?
        nixon_why69 13d ago
        Soviet Russia and early communist China both went from mostly-illiterate peasant economies to mostly-literate, partially industrialized, with home-grown heavy industry and weapons technology in the span of like 15-20 years. Then the soviet system stagnated hard under Brezhnev while the Chinese pivoted under Deng. But those first gains definitely happened under full communism and no capitalist economy has modernized faster.
        wavemode 14d ago
        > Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed The word you're looking for is "collapse". It's when something is stable at one point in time, but then later breaks down. That's what "changed". It wasn't random like weather or something. The economic systems collapsed. > None of this is settled The fact that it has happened numerous times in different parts of the world makes it pretty settled in my mind.
  - shigawire 14d ago
    Democracy in business would be worker co-ops or employee ownership schemes. It would still be fully market-based, not planned.
  - deleted 14d ago
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  - miyoji 14d ago
    > Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy? Not at all. Market vs planned economy is about how the economy is set up. Are there businesses that offer products that you can choose between? That's a market economy. You can have that with democratic governance of corporations. The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy. You don't need ownership by idiot dictators with money to have a market.
    - vasco 14d ago
      > The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy How? Will you also advocate to killing a bunch of people to get from now to the state where workers own the means of production like Trotsky and friends?
- freedomben 14d ago
  > Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. Ianal but I don't think the laws care about governing structure of corps. You can start a new corp and run it democratically all you want. There are co-ops and other interesting structures out there
  - deleted 14d ago
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  - marcus_holmes 14d ago
    Afaik corps can only have board voting on the basis of share ownership ("one share one vote"), but you can mess around with how many votes each share class gets. Co-ops can have more democratic voting arrangements, and usually have "one shareholder one vote" principles, though other options are available, and you can mess around with how many votes each shareholder gets.
    - jeltz 13d ago
      This is very dependent on jurisdiction and type of company.
- Arnt 14d ago
  Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.
  - kmeisthax 14d ago
    It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy. It's very explicitly plutocracy (rule by money) as the operating principle of voting power is one share, one vote. Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy. If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.
    - Arnt 14d ago
      It's one share, one vote. And you have a choice: You can ask the company to pay you (ie. apply for a job there), or you can pay for a share in the company. Either way, the decisions are made by those who pay. And that can include you — anyone and everyone has the right to start a company and to employ others, anyone and everyone has the right to ask for shares in the company as part of negotiating compensation. I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
      - Timon3 14d ago
        > It's one share, one vote. This is just wrong. As kmeisthax mentioned, shares can have different voting weights - if any at all. Many shareholders have no voting power. > I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is. Did you actually employ them, or did you buy a specific service?
- tirpen 14d ago
  > Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight. Congratulations you have reinvented communism from first principles! And you are completely correct in your analysis.
  - noir_lord 14d ago
    Regulation of corporations and the internal/external harms they do isn't communism. That's a hilarious leap.
    - flossly 14d ago
      Actually you reply to a comment that makes a lot of sense. Look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative And in Russian I believe such a company is called a "Soviet". They idea that the main part of the economy is run by this kind of organizations is one of the best parts of the USSR's attempt at communism.
      - noir_lord 14d ago
        Except A) he said none of that B) it's not actually relevant to what he did say. There is a vast range of ways you can regulate a corporation and only some of them qualify as communism. Germany has worker councils, it's still not communist. Several European countries have much stricter regulations on how companies behave that moves them from the absolute power fiefdom internal model, guess what, still not communism.
  - 976157424477 14d ago
    [dead]
- jasonvorhe 14d ago
  Who do you think pays for the political election campaign theater of all theses "democratic candidates" though? I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.
- flossly 14d ago
  It's allowed to do a more democratic business in most countries, it's called a: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative There have been some govts that mandated this type of organization for part of their economy; we usually refer to that as communism. (no value judgement here, there are day's when I'm quite a commie myself)
- bawolff 14d ago
  We picked democracy because it is very difficult for a citizen to move to a different country/start their own if they are unhappy. Democracy is a fix for that power imbalance. By contrast its relatively easy to quit and start a new company if you feel like it. That is the control for a company.
cebert 14d ago
This sounds like a mistake and a part of Automatic. This is not a good look for the brand.
delichon 14d ago
Corporate coup survivors: Matt Mullenweg, Sam Altman, Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark. They should form a club.
- SenHeng 14d ago
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- cindyllm 14d ago
  [dead]
- fwip 14d ago
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  - hijjerl9 14d ago
    [flagged]
    - flossly 14d ago
      I dont care for Sam Altman's color. But, c'mon, how's he not white? I learned Duck-typing from Ruby: if it talks like a duck, walks like a duck and swims like a duck -- it's a duck. Applying this to Sam: he's white.
      - hijjerl9 14d ago
        [flagged]
        pavo-etc 14d ago
        People can be multiple things.
      - imthatsteve 14d ago
        [flagged]
pluc 14d ago
Dupe/existing discussion from a day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104
zero_shift 14d ago
I only recently realised why the org is called AutoMATTic
- rpozarickij 14d ago
  A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).
  - deleted 14d ago
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  - Haven880 14d ago
    Not really explaining autoMATTic. Amazon, "A" is because Jeff wanted it at the top of search. Fox, Dell, Walmart, Disney, all is closer to the example.
    - jrflowers 14d ago
      Same with Taco Bell
      - dylan604 14d ago
        If only Alexander hadn't wasted time on the phone!
    - MBCook 14d ago
      I was just thinking about the A thing the other day. A1 Plumbing, Acme Brick, AAA Home Servicing all the companies named over the years to try and be the first in the phone book. But phone books have been dead for a long time. And search results aren’t alphabetical. It would be interesting for someone to graph or somehow otherwise show how names have changed in response. I have seen those occasional pictures of businesses named “(thing) near me” in an attempt to win at Google searches.
NSUserDefaults 14d ago
So glad I just converted my site to Hugo.. happy to get away from this whole bunch of people.
generj 14d ago
What a feckless board.
- manarth 13d ago
  More like impotent. They attempted to take action, but were stymied by Matt's voting power.
largbae 14d ago
I only see the headlines of this drama. All it tells me is to stay far away from any dependency on this company.
- dlcarrier 14d ago
  Definitely stay away from anything Matt Mullenweg is involved in. Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.
  - m4rtink 13d ago
    That anyone still uses Wordpress after such a horrendous breach of trust is beyond me.
    - micromacrofoot 13d ago
      it'll be around for decades, you don't power ~1/3 of the internet and just disappear overnight
  - ValentineC 13d ago
    > Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository. Not just (forking and) signing, but considering he runs the "official WordPress plug-in repository" as well, he pretty much conducted a supply chain attack.
- xp84 14d ago
  In 2010 WordPress seemed like important technology. It wasn’t perfect, was a big and fruitful hacking target, but it had been built and refined and had a big ecosystem. I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP. Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?
imthatsteve 14d ago
[flagged]
- dlcarrier 14d ago
  The purpose of the Communications Decency Act is to allow providers to moderate community content, and section 230 provides liability from both undermoderating and overmoderating, so that providers don't forgo mederating altogether, for liability reasons. If section 230 only protected from undermoderating and not from overmoderating, then providers would be incentivized to keep every comment up, from scam links to hate speech, because they'd only get in trouble for removing comments and not for allowing them.
- marcus_holmes 14d ago
  Isn't most of the moderation from downvotes rather than mods?
  - 3stacks 14d ago
    I don't even have a downvote button. Is it "flag"?
    - hellon3wheels 14d ago
      You get a downvote button, separate from "flag", once you reach a certain karma level (I forget the number, though)
    - BLKNSLVR 14d ago
      I think you need to be at a certain level of karma to 'earn' the right to downvote. Flag is for inappropriate content / behaviour.
    - mikestew 14d ago
      Karma threshold for the downvote button used to be 500, IIRC. Only 449 upvotes to go!
      - 12d ago
davidmurphy 14d ago
Despicable. What an obscene leader + board to not have the guts to remove him properly.
- dlcarrier 14d ago
  He can vote in a replacement board. The board knew that any action they took was temporary, and likely planned around this from the start.
  - ImPostingOnHN 13d ago
    maybe they have a good severance package and are tired of being impotent to curb matt's nonsense
dang 14d ago
Recent and related: Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 - Sept 2026 (144 comments) Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283 - Sept 2026 (372 comments) (I know there have been many other threads in this long saga but I don't have the time (or the stomach) to try to list them) p.s. We merged an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683265) into this one, which is why the timestamps of some of the comments are older.
- rideontime 13d ago
  Maybe the headline should be edited. Right now, those who see only the headline are misled into believing that he has "returned as CEO," when evidence can only confirm that he is in control of the company's official communication channels.
  - dang 13d ago
    The OP says it has been confirmed so I assume it has?
f33d5173 14d ago
So he was on a leave of absense, and now is no longer on such a leave? This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense, but they give no evidence of that in the article. I saw it suggested that he usually has wild ideas after returning from burning man, and the board wanted to insulate the company from the effects of that. That he's now back is evidence for a theory along those lines, and contradicts a theory that the board was trying to get rid of him. But I have no insight beyond that.
- wmf 14d ago
  Do you think his leave of absence was for one day?
- DANmode 14d ago
  > This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense Way more are than we are told about.
BLKNSLVR 14d ago
It does sound as if he has lost his grip on reality. > When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.” And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.
- nosioptar 14d ago
  There's an episode of Archer where Archer and another dude have to battle to the death to determine who the new pirate king is. Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat?
  - BLKNSLVR 14d ago
    > Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man Not beyond the realms of possibility then
  - throwup238 14d ago
    > Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat? There is a Thunderdome at Burning Man. https://journal.burningman.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The-Thunderdome-photo-by-Steve-Tambosso-665x375.jpg https://journal.burningman.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Th...
    - zbentley 13d ago
      Off topic, but the fact that that's a Wordpress link just makes it funnier.
- TJSomething 14d ago
  I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.
glenstein 14d ago
Seems like nobody is actually reading the TFA which is a shame because what the article describes is truly mind boggling: >However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.
- stackghost 14d ago
  That company sounds like a clusterfuck. Good luck attracting good talent with such dysfunctional leadership.
  - saghm 14d ago
    Might by time for another employee buyout? https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/17/24272867/automattic-employee-buyout-wordpress-drama https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/17/24272867/automattic-empl...
  - neya 14d ago
    A lot of WordPress enterprise users will be upset after finding out that after paying $20-100k a month, Wordpress actually poaches their employees. Just inspect a Wordpress enterprise site's response to certain endpoints using cURL or Postman, it will actually tell you to apply for Automattic. I have been meaning to write about this for a very long time.
    - meric_ 14d ago
      Eh I mean this is common default no? If you inspect element on many sites it links to the career page. Reddit, discord, etc. Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching
      - gonzalohm 13d ago
fn-mote 14d ago
This title would benefit from editorializing “of Automattic” for those who do not follow the daily drama this individual has created. ETA: Or better yet a clearer statement that nothing about this is clear.
- deleted 13d ago
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gregjw 14d ago
sigh
applfanboysbgon 14d ago
> and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well,” a company spokesperson shared Did anyone else think "what the fuck did I just read" after this sentence? Did Matt write it himself while posing as a "spokesperson"? This reads like that time Trump wrote in pseudonymously to a newspaper about how amazing and perfect Trump was. Oh, I hadn't finished reading. The whole article is a WTF did I just read.
- deleted 13d ago
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- glenstein 13d ago
  I think most people aren't reading the article and are not appreciating how insane this story is. But you're right the whole thing I could barely believe what was happening there.
- ValentineC 13d ago
  There are a lot of sycophants posting in the comment threads here and on Reddit. If you look up their career histories on LinkedIn, some of them are rising pretty quickly within the Automattic ranks.
greatgib 14d ago
What is curious is that there is very little "leak" from insiders regarding what is going on, how employees are living this joke level management.
- MBCook 14d ago
  I can’t help but think that’s because they don’t know any better and maybe because they’re getting better informed by the reporting than what they’re actually getting from management. Which would be terrible if true.
- pyrale 13d ago
  there has been two rounds of cash offers for dissenters to leave. People staying are probably not the kind that will publicly raise the issue.
yieldcrv 14d ago
Dont these no-code chasing marketing teams have other ways of building their leadgen ponzi schemes instead of bothering with Wordpress by now?
- mitxela 13d ago
  I heard that scamming people by feeding false info to chatgpt works now: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/221056/warning-openai-made-me-lose-money-https-paragonvps-com https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/221056/warning-openai-made...
  - yieldcrv 13d ago
    signin wall so can’t read, but doesn’t sound like what I’m referring to
deleted 14d ago
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throwaway463645 14d ago
I'm not involved at all in WP, but one thing that I've noticed is that when people talk about Matt Mullenweg online, it's apparently alright to call him mentally ill, scum, unhinged, wish him harm, cheer his setbacks, etc etc. I've actually never seen anything like it. Is this what the WP community are like? I think that would break me too. Microsoft has done plenty of awful things in its day, but I've never seen people diagnose Steve Ballmer with mental disorders and wish him harm, let alone that would become just the accepted majoritarian narrative around him, as it seems to be around Matt Mullenweg. It seems wild. More broadly, why is there a 'WP drama' sub-Reddit? Why are there blogs documenting all of this with glee? Why are people registering domains to post screeds about this? In other words, why has a cottage industry sprung up around - as far as I can tell - bullying Matt Mullenweg? I don't know what to make of it. Who are the WP community, that this is how they engage? Is there some big 4chan-WordPress overlap I'm not aware of? Is this an outgrowth of teenage faux-radicalism off Tumblr? I genuinely don't know, but it seems very off-putting. If this is what the WP community are like, I sure wouldn't want to become involved in it.
- bigyabai 13d ago
  > I'm not involved at all in WP That's an oddly specific thing to clarify upfront.
- earthdeity 13d ago
  The first meaningful internet presence he had was the whole WP engine debacle, which seemed to be a pretty ill-advised thing to do from a legal standpoint and also upset the open source community, who are rightly concerned about that sort of thing. Some of the actions taken then broke a number of small sites, upsetting those users. Overall, you've got a baseline reasonable number of pissed off hobbyists with internet presences. Microsoft has had its controversies, but the reason the interest became personal here is it seems this was his own initiative (he kicked everything off with a public blog post). And once again in this case, it looks like a bunch of chaotic behaviour centred on the individual more-so than standard "unpopular corporate decision making". That sort of thing has a big PR blast radius and has exposed him to criticism more than necessary (or normal). Given how avoidable the above is (by simply operating through his lawyers / the organisation), it's feeding speculation on his mental state.
dcmatt 14d ago
Looks like he was just at Burning Man so this behavior tracks. https://ma.tt/2026/09/bm-snaps/ https://ma.tt/2026/09/bm-snaps/
bawolff 14d ago
I don't say this lightly, but this sounds like someone going through a mental health crisis.
- xyst 13d ago
  No, he's just an asshole
  - user_7832 13d ago
    I mean, both can be true at the same time. For a slightly controversial example, look at Kanye. If you knew him before he got off his rocker (especially the 2000s), he was a very different person than who he has become today.
    - KingMob 13d ago
      In Kanye's case, I think: 1. He should probably go back on his bipolar medication, even if he feels less creative on it. 2. Paying for the surgery his mother died during really messed up his head. Partly because he probably blames himself, partly because she was one of the few stabilizing influences in his life. He really started going downhill after. He might have always been impulsive-grandstanding-interrupt-Taylor-Swift Kanye, but it's conceivable he wouldn't have morphed into slavery-is-a-state-of-mind-"i-love-hitler"-antisemitic Kanye. Sigh. "I miss the old Kanye." Time to give 808s and Heartbreak a re-listen.
- JumpCrisscross 13d ago
  > someone going through a mental health crisis Or coming down from amphetamines.
- micromacrofoot 13d ago
  all the oligarchs are doing it these days
KPGv2 13d ago
Anytime I read anything about this guy, Automattic, or Wordpress, I—a Tumblr user—get the nervous sweats about my beloved shayla.
Aeolun 13d ago
Matt is of the opinion that if they’re going to try and take his thing he might as well burn it down, isn’t he xD
- raverbashing 13d ago
  Yeah. Sounds like this is no longer Automattic for the People
  - ValentineC 13d ago
    When was Automattic ever "for the people"?
    - duskwuff 13d ago
      1992. (It's a music joke.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_for_the_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_for_the_People
xyst 13d ago
It surprises me to no end that people continue working for this lunatic. When this company was offering an early severance, I am surprised only 159 took the offer [1]. Per cited article, this was 8.4% of the total workforce. Apparently there was even a second severance offer at around the same time of the CEO's legal fight with WP Engine [2]. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/159-employees-are-leaving-automattic-as-ceos-fight-with-wp-engine-escalates/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/159-employees-are-leaving-... [2] https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-matt-mullenweg/ https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-ma...
ExoticPearTree 13d ago
This and previous submission about the Automattic board attempt to fire the founder should be used as a lesson that you should never ever give up control of your company to anyone. Facebook is a good example on how to structure your company to keep control of it.
- johannes1234321 13d ago
  As fou der - yes. The question is if investors accept that gamble. Facebook, when, Meta took a bunch of bad decisions in recentyears. All that Metaverse is just a write off ... for now the stock market liked the "vision" but that may end. How willing investor's then are to play such a game is to be seen. I guess this only works in exceptional cases. Facebook was a money printing machine everybody wanted to be a part of.
- scheme271 13d ago
  And FB is a lesson to a lot of companies and the public not to allow the same dual class stock structure. Zuckerberg can cash out a lot of his equity and still be the controlling force behind FB even though other people "own" a majority stake of the stocks and equity.
- SecretDreams 13d ago
  > Facebook is a good example on how to structure your company to keep control of it. Yes, there's a lot of lessons we can take away from Facebook. Most are not positive lessons, mind you.
- mrguyorama 13d ago
  Is your implication that the world is a better place if it is impossible to remove someone like Matt from control of a company?
  - ExoticPearTree 13d ago
    No, I said it would be better for the founder to not be put in a position where he/she can be fired.
program 13d ago
[flagged]
- youre-wrong3 13d ago
  [dead]
- dgellow 13d ago
  That’s all nice, but what does that have to do with the article?
- jeltz 13d ago
  So do you have any comment on the article or are you just here to promote Automattic?
- bubba99 13d ago
  Very thoughtful comment, so what?
catoc 13d ago
Sounds chaoticc
keiferski 13d ago
I hope someone eventually does a deep-dive on the organizational structure of WordPress and how much of a mess it is. As someone that’s pretty much worked in/with WP for my entire career, it’s always seemed like the worst of both worlds - distributed and slow-moving, yet still ultimately controlled to a massive extent by a single individual. These kinds of absurd situations just slowly push people toward Shopify, other CMSes, etc. There will be no grand exodus, because too many companies are intertwined to the WP ecosystem. But combined with AI, the horrible design of Gutenberg, and half a dozen other things, I really worry for the future of WP. At this point I generally only recommend it to people that need something extremely customized. Other platforms are easier to use and don’t have the soap opera drama.
- thebiglebrewski 13d ago
  oh yeah, Shopify isn't also ultimately controlled by a single individual /s. Try Solidus for something controlled by a community!
  - keiferski 13d ago
    Shopify is a public company and thus subject to far more regulations and expected behavior of the CEO. I also specifically did not merely say that being controlled by one person was bad, but that it was bad in the context of also being slow at decision making. In many cases having a single decision maker is a must for being dynamic. Haven’t heard of Solidus, but I’ll check it out.
    - KingMob 13d ago
      Regulations maybe, but CEO expectations? Doesn't seem to be happening. Shopify's CEO was in the news just recently for arguing that rich people should be able to cast more votes. That's the most naked anti-democracy stance I've heard in ages. (And this is before we get into funding "deport-the-foreigners-and-minorities" DHH's Omarchy.)
  - dakolli 13d ago
    Or just don't use these hacky solutions and just make a gd ecom website. It's 2026, use claude if you have too. There is no reason for shopify to exist (or wordpress for that matter, but at least wordpress isn't for profit). They say AI should kill SaaS, but it should actually kill all these dumb abstraction PaaS. I say this as someone who has recently helped a few friends move their ecom stores off shopify, and wow, I didn't know such a horrible paradigm could exist. I genuinely think it would be easier for someone to learn a web stack in 2026 than learn to piece together whatever spaghetti monster shopify, and similar hacks are.
hypfer 13d ago
From an outsiders perspective, Matt's claims of comment sections like this one being heavily astroturfed do sound somewhat credible. Every single one of them I saw so far has the same bad faith attacks, claiming that that guy's mental health would be compromised - and then nothing else other than implying that corporate processes are correct and you are to shut up. Are there real people with opinions about this? I'd like to hear them.
- bayindirh 13d ago
  I mean, this is not his first rodeo at that and our not first watch of these power struggles. He's clinging to what he has, and for any outsider this (or the path leading to this) doesn't look like healthy behavior. What we live through life can trigger extremely strange behaviors we didn't see before from people, so I don't think all of this can be attributed to astroturfing. Every comment section on the internet is a target for astroturfing, yet attribute everything to it, is not right.
  - hypfer 13d ago
    Uh you've just now said the same in slightly different words, then closed with "you're wrong" spoken through a corporate filter. Which.. kinda doesn't really convince me. But anyway > He's clinging to what he has, and [..] this [..] doesn't look like healthy behavior. That's not something I would agree with. Can you explain why you believe that protecting "your baby" and clinging to it is seen by you as "not healthy"? From my understanding of the world, that is very healthy. Why not?
- Macha 13d ago
  This seems pretty easily explainable by Matt’s actions appearing to be hypocritical and antithetical to the views of people likely to comment on Internet message boards. People value stability from infrastructure providers and Matt’s antics with wordpress.org during the WPEngine dispute salted the earth for his chances of getting support in a board dispute. Even Matt’s own previous posting here did him no favours. Sometimes a broadly one sided reaction is just a broadly one sided reaction, no conspiracy needed.
paulbjensen 13d ago
He who controls the Slack, controls the (Wordpress) universe.
- pwillia7 13d ago
  a ban for a ban makes the whole world permabanned
achenet 13d ago
I can't help but read this and be reminded of what Steve Albini said about refusing a major label contract with Big Black: > If you don't use contracts, you don't have any contracts to worry about. If you don't have a tour rider, you don't have a tour rider to argue about. If you don't have a booking agent, you don't have a booking agent to argue with. > To us, every moment we remained unfettered and in control was a success. We never had a manager. We never had a booking agent. We never had a lawyer. We never took an advance from a record company. We booked our own tours, paid our own bills, made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences. The results of that methodology speak for themselves: Nobody ever told us what to do, and nobody took any of our money. If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.
- pessimizer 13d ago
  He also didn't make a living, and record companies took his style and used it to generate billions. His income came from his studio, production work, and being a celebrity. I was just having a discussion about this with a friend who watched an NYU hosted debate in the 90s between the guy I can't remember from Sick Of It All and Sam McPheeters from Born Against. Born Against had been trolling Sick Of It All for ages (because it was fun), putting up posters, passing out fliers around their shows and talking about them for signing to a major label and distributor, and especially for censoring their lyric sheet in order to get sold at Walmart. Born Against was traditional DIY, on Sam's record label (Vermiform), didn't have bar codes on their records, mostly mailorder, etc. Both were right, McPheeters was right that Sick Of It All had sold out and censored themselves in order to fit into corporate commerce, but the guy from Sick Of It All was more right. His position was that Born Against (like a Steve Albini) were rich middle class kids who were just having fun, and Sick Of It All were from working class families that they had to support. Music can be the most important thing for hobbyists, but that kind of music is just music. They on the other hand were looking for a ticket to a better life, and one that allowed them to do what they were good at and what they enjoyed. So Born Against and their style ended up aped by the corporations, and spreads into emocore and all that shit, makes the companies billions, and Sam McPheeters ends up with zero of that. He's fine, he's writing columns for the Atlantic and doing interviews with NPR (incidentally because wealthy people pay to be close to "cool" people.) Meanwhile the style of music represented by Sick Of It All pretty much runs its course, but the members pocket a bunch of cash, and get to move on to do whatever else they want. Purity is a privilege of the already wealthy. A lot of people chose Wordpress because it was the cheapest functional option (Free.) They were not interested in writing their own CMS, and couldn't afford to anyway. > If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you. Also in respect to Mullenweg, afaik he owns 84% of the company. This never had a chance without his consent.
JumpCrisscross 13d ago
https://archive.is/ce24M https://archive.is/ce24M
leetrout 13d ago
Can we put "Automattic" I. The title? I had no idea who this was. (Yes it is comfortable under my rock)
ubermonkey 13d ago
This is going to get very entertainingly ugly, I suspect.
lenerdenator 13d ago
Yet another failure of corporate governance in this industry. If you can pull a bunch of shenanigans to get around being fired by your bosses, then the system isn't working.
ryukoposting 13d ago
> ctrl+f > photomatt ...hmm. Guess we'll just have to wait a couple hours.
wahhselfishceo 13d ago
[dead]
chuckadams 13d ago
> Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.” Uhhh, that's not normal... is it?
pessimizer 13d ago
They were hoping he'd just accept it and walk away with infinite money and zero responsibilities. But he really likes being boss and really loves attention. Try again in 3 years. Although I guarantee they would run it into the ground without him. I just have a feeling. The people going after Mullenweg are not backseat drivers, they're backseat critics. They have no idea how to drive, they just know when other people are doing it wrong. If you don't want people like Mullenweg treating your business like a toy, try not having an internet monoculture. There were plenty of competitors to Wordpress that didn't have an insane database schema, but web programmers are herd animals. Somehow they made the only competitor with traction Drupal, which was way worse. You all chose to hitch your wagon to Mullenweg (and DHH for that matter), now it's their wagon. They both also made it easy to fork at any time, which is evidence that their enemies are parasites imo. Mullenweg is literally fighting private equity that doesn't want to host their own infrastructure because it wouldn't be profitable, but they also don't want to contribute. And the internet cries for them, because the internet was looking for a bargain.
- ValentineC 13d ago
  > If you don't want people like Mullenweg treating your business like a toy, try not having an internet monoculture. There were plenty of competitors to Wordpress that didn't have an insane database schema, but web programmers are herd animals. There were many other decent competitors when WordPress was first forked like Movable Type and Textpattern. Many people I know also used LiveJournal and their forks heavily, and of course there was the Blogger crowd. For CMS, there was PHPNuke, PostNuke, Joomla, Mambo, but they were all for "professional" website developers, not for people unfamiliar with web development and just looking to muck around. I think WordPress took off mainly because the web crowd rallied around it for their then-good design and taste. Plugins and "good enough" themes were another moat — I think it helped that plugins let people install just enough rope to hang themselves with (or: they get to decide the level of complexity they're comfortable with), unlike the ready-built CMSes which bundled everything and the kitchen sink. Now, I have no idea why most of the early WordPress community chose to rally around and elevate Matt Mullenweg, but I personally think he wrote well and had good taste back in the days.
brachkow 13d ago
Company is called AutoMATTic, btw

274 points by ilamont 14d ago

deleted 14d ago

[deleted]

That’s a weird thing to say about “coup attempts.” Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight. In the world of AI I imagine that Automattic’s core business model is in turmoil.

sva_ 14d ago
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy? I think we've seen over an over again which one works and which one doesn't.
- jmull 14d ago
  Is that a settled question? China isn't exactly struggling right now.
  - thaumasiotes 14d ago
    > China isn't exactly struggling right now. Have you asked people in China about this?
    - gverrilla 13d ago
      Support for the party is very strong.
      - thaumasiotes 13d ago
        Boy, you're not right about that. Where'd you get the idea?
  - sva_ 14d ago
    If you look on Alibaba or AliExpress and see different companies competing and undercutting each others prices, I don't really see it as a planned economy.
    - dghlsakjg 14d ago
      I think a better term might be a “steered economy”. You see fierce competition in some very specific and preordained market areas. Lithium batteries, solar panels, electric cars, industrial and autonomous robots, AI. Now go look at the 5 year plan from Beijing. Green technology, robotics, mature node chips, and AI are the focuses. In other words, it isn’t a mistake that China dominates in the industries that it does.
    - throwup238 14d ago
      The CCP publishes their primary central planning mechanism for all to see. They just adopted the new 15th Five Year Plan in March [1]. There’s a whole bureaucracy just to coordinate the implementation at the sector, provincial, and corporate level driven by the State Council, NDRC, and NPC. Governments at all levels are involved with coming up with their own implementation plans to execute on the Five Year Plan. You can trace decades of Chinese industrial development to those plans but the Chinese system is very different from the Soviet central planning mechanism, which is why I think you’re misinterpreting Alibaba’s price competition. The CCP explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like Alibaba and the manufacturers on it to compete; that’s their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the five year plan instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but it’s very much there. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Five-Year_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Five-Year_Plan
      - mitxela 13d ago
        If that's central planning then the USA is also centrally planned.
        throwup238 13d ago
  - edgyquant 14d ago
    China has succeeded so much by moving away from a planned economy when they were fully planned they were one of the poorest nations in the world. Most successful nations are mixed economies and yes, this is a settled question.
    - miyoji 14d ago
      Past performance is no indication of future success. It doesn't matter what's been successful in the past, these things can change. Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed and so did the narrative. None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.
      - Kuxe 14d ago
        > Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was) According to whom?
        nixon_why69 13d ago
        Soviet Russia and early communist China both went from mostly-illiterate peasant economies to mostly-literate, partially industrialized, with home-grown heavy industry and weapons technology in the span of like 15-20 years. Then the soviet system stagnated hard under Brezhnev while the Chinese pivoted under Deng. But those first gains definitely happened under full communism and no capitalist economy has modernized faster.
      - wavemode 14d ago
        > Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed The word you're looking for is "collapse". It's when something is stable at one point in time, but then later breaks down. That's what "changed". It wasn't random like weather or something. The economic systems collapsed. > None of this is settled The fact that it has happened numerous times in different parts of the world makes it pretty settled in my mind.
- shigawire 14d ago
  Democracy in business would be worker co-ops or employee ownership schemes. It would still be fully market-based, not planned.
- deleted 14d ago
  [deleted]
- miyoji 14d ago
  > Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy? Not at all. Market vs planned economy is about how the economy is set up. Are there businesses that offer products that you can choose between? That's a market economy. You can have that with democratic governance of corporations. The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy. You don't need ownership by idiot dictators with money to have a market.
  - vasco 14d ago
    > The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy How? Will you also advocate to killing a bunch of people to get from now to the state where workers own the means of production like Trotsky and friends?
freedomben 14d ago
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. Ianal but I don't think the laws care about governing structure of corps. You can start a new corp and run it democratically all you want. There are co-ops and other interesting structures out there
- deleted 14d ago
  [deleted]
- marcus_holmes 14d ago
  Afaik corps can only have board voting on the basis of share ownership ("one share one vote"), but you can mess around with how many votes each share class gets. Co-ops can have more democratic voting arrangements, and usually have "one shareholder one vote" principles, though other options are available, and you can mess around with how many votes each shareholder gets.
  - jeltz 13d ago
    This is very dependent on jurisdiction and type of company.
Arnt 14d ago
Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.
- kmeisthax 14d ago
  It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy. It's very explicitly plutocracy (rule by money) as the operating principle of voting power is one share, one vote. Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy. If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.
  - Arnt 14d ago
    It's one share, one vote. And you have a choice: You can ask the company to pay you (ie. apply for a job there), or you can pay for a share in the company. Either way, the decisions are made by those who pay. And that can include you — anyone and everyone has the right to start a company and to employ others, anyone and everyone has the right to ask for shares in the company as part of negotiating compensation. I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
    - Timon3 14d ago
      > It's one share, one vote. This is just wrong. As kmeisthax mentioned, shares can have different voting weights - if any at all. Many shareholders have no voting power. > I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is. Did you actually employ them, or did you buy a specific service?
tirpen 14d ago
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight. Congratulations you have reinvented communism from first principles! And you are completely correct in your analysis.
- noir_lord 14d ago
  Regulation of corporations and the internal/external harms they do isn't communism. That's a hilarious leap.
  - flossly 14d ago
    Actually you reply to a comment that makes a lot of sense. Look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative And in Russian I believe such a company is called a "Soviet". They idea that the main part of the economy is run by this kind of organizations is one of the best parts of the USSR's attempt at communism.
    - noir_lord 14d ago
      Except A) he said none of that B) it's not actually relevant to what he did say. There is a vast range of ways you can regulate a corporation and only some of them qualify as communism. Germany has worker councils, it's still not communist. Several European countries have much stricter regulations on how companies behave that moves them from the absolute power fiefdom internal model, guess what, still not communism.
- 976157424477 14d ago
  [dead]
jasonvorhe 14d ago
Who do you think pays for the political election campaign theater of all theses "democratic candidates" though? I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.
flossly 14d ago
It's allowed to do a more democratic business in most countries, it's called a: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative There have been some govts that mandated this type of organization for part of their economy; we usually refer to that as communism. (no value judgement here, there are day's when I'm quite a commie myself)
bawolff 14d ago
We picked democracy because it is very difficult for a citizen to move to a different country/start their own if they are unhappy. Democracy is a fix for that power imbalance. By contrast its relatively easy to quit and start a new company if you feel like it. That is the control for a company.

cebert 14d ago

This sounds like a mistake and a part of Automatic. This is not a good look for the brand.

delichon 14d ago

Corporate coup survivors: Matt Mullenweg, Sam Altman, Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark. They should form a club.

SenHeng 14d ago
[flagged]
cindyllm 14d ago
[dead]
fwip 14d ago
[flagged]
- hijjerl9 14d ago
  [flagged]
  - flossly 14d ago
    I dont care for Sam Altman's color. But, c'mon, how's he not white? I learned Duck-typing from Ruby: if it talks like a duck, walks like a duck and swims like a duck -- it's a duck. Applying this to Sam: he's white.
    - hijjerl9 14d ago
      [flagged]
      - pavo-etc 14d ago
        People can be multiple things.
    - imthatsteve 14d ago
      [flagged]

pluc 14d ago

Dupe/existing discussion from a day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104

zero_shift 14d ago

I only recently realised why the org is called AutoMATTic

rpozarickij 14d ago
A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).
- deleted 14d ago
  [deleted]
- Haven880 14d ago
  Not really explaining autoMATTic. Amazon, "A" is because Jeff wanted it at the top of search. Fox, Dell, Walmart, Disney, all is closer to the example.
  - jrflowers 14d ago
    Same with Taco Bell
    - dylan604 14d ago
      If only Alexander hadn't wasted time on the phone!
  - MBCook 14d ago
    I was just thinking about the A thing the other day. A1 Plumbing, Acme Brick, AAA Home Servicing all the companies named over the years to try and be the first in the phone book. But phone books have been dead for a long time. And search results aren’t alphabetical. It would be interesting for someone to graph or somehow otherwise show how names have changed in response. I have seen those occasional pictures of businesses named “(thing) near me” in an attempt to win at Google searches.

NSUserDefaults 14d ago

So glad I just converted my site to Hugo.. happy to get away from this whole bunch of people.

generj 14d ago

What a feckless board.

manarth 13d ago
More like impotent. They attempted to take action, but were stymied by Matt's voting power.

largbae 14d ago

I only see the headlines of this drama. All it tells me is to stay far away from any dependency on this company.

dlcarrier 14d ago
Definitely stay away from anything Matt Mullenweg is involved in. Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.
- m4rtink 13d ago
  That anyone still uses Wordpress after such a horrendous breach of trust is beyond me.
  - micromacrofoot 13d ago
    it'll be around for decades, you don't power ~1/3 of the internet and just disappear overnight
- ValentineC 13d ago
  > Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository. Not just (forking and) signing, but considering he runs the "official WordPress plug-in repository" as well, he pretty much conducted a supply chain attack.
xp84 14d ago
In 2010 WordPress seemed like important technology. It wasn’t perfect, was a big and fruitful hacking target, but it had been built and refined and had a big ecosystem. I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP. Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?

imthatsteve 14d ago

[flagged]

dlcarrier 14d ago
The purpose of the Communications Decency Act is to allow providers to moderate community content, and section 230 provides liability from both undermoderating and overmoderating, so that providers don't forgo mederating altogether, for liability reasons. If section 230 only protected from undermoderating and not from overmoderating, then providers would be incentivized to keep every comment up, from scam links to hate speech, because they'd only get in trouble for removing comments and not for allowing them.
marcus_holmes 14d ago
Isn't most of the moderation from downvotes rather than mods?
- 3stacks 14d ago
  I don't even have a downvote button. Is it "flag"?
  - hellon3wheels 14d ago
    You get a downvote button, separate from "flag", once you reach a certain karma level (I forget the number, though)
  - BLKNSLVR 14d ago
    I think you need to be at a certain level of karma to 'earn' the right to downvote. Flag is for inappropriate content / behaviour.
  - mikestew 14d ago
    Karma threshold for the downvote button used to be 500, IIRC. Only 449 upvotes to go!
    - 12d ago

davidmurphy 14d ago

Despicable. What an obscene leader + board to not have the guts to remove him properly.

dlcarrier 14d ago
He can vote in a replacement board. The board knew that any action they took was temporary, and likely planned around this from the start.
- ImPostingOnHN 13d ago
  maybe they have a good severance package and are tired of being impotent to curb matt's nonsense

dang 14d ago

Recent and related: Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 - Sept 2026 (144 comments) Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283 - Sept 2026 (372 comments) (I know there have been many other threads in this long saga but I don't have the time (or the stomach) to try to list them) p.s. We merged an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683265) into this one, which is why the timestamps of some of the comments are older.

rideontime 13d ago
Maybe the headline should be edited. Right now, those who see only the headline are misled into believing that he has "returned as CEO," when evidence can only confirm that he is in control of the company's official communication channels.
- dang 13d ago
  The OP says it has been confirmed so I assume it has?

f33d5173 14d ago

So he was on a leave of absense, and now is no longer on such a leave? This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense, but they give no evidence of that in the article. I saw it suggested that he usually has wild ideas after returning from burning man, and the board wanted to insulate the company from the effects of that. That he's now back is evidence for a theory along those lines, and contradicts a theory that the board was trying to get rid of him. But I have no insight beyond that.

wmf 14d ago
Do you think his leave of absence was for one day?
DANmode 14d ago
> This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense Way more are than we are told about.

BLKNSLVR 14d ago

It does sound as if he has lost his grip on reality. > When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.” And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.

nosioptar 14d ago
There's an episode of Archer where Archer and another dude have to battle to the death to determine who the new pirate king is. Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat?
- BLKNSLVR 14d ago
  > Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man Not beyond the realms of possibility then
- throwup238 14d ago
  > Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat? There is a Thunderdome at Burning Man. https://journal.burningman.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The-Thunderdome-photo-by-Steve-Tambosso-665x375.jpg https://journal.burningman.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Th...
  - zbentley 13d ago
    Off topic, but the fact that that's a Wordpress link just makes it funnier.
TJSomething 14d ago
I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.

glenstein 14d ago

Seems like nobody is actually reading the TFA which is a shame because what the article describes is truly mind boggling: >However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.

stackghost 14d ago
That company sounds like a clusterfuck. Good luck attracting good talent with such dysfunctional leadership.
- saghm 14d ago
  Might by time for another employee buyout? https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/17/24272867/automattic-employee-buyout-wordpress-drama https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/17/24272867/automattic-empl...
- neya 14d ago
  A lot of WordPress enterprise users will be upset after finding out that after paying $20-100k a month, Wordpress actually poaches their employees. Just inspect a Wordpress enterprise site's response to certain endpoints using cURL or Postman, it will actually tell you to apply for Automattic. I have been meaning to write about this for a very long time.
  - meric_ 14d ago
    Eh I mean this is common default no? If you inspect element on many sites it links to the career page. Reddit, discord, etc. Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching
    - gonzalohm 13d ago

fn-mote 14d ago

This title would benefit from editorializing “of Automattic” for those who do not follow the daily drama this individual has created. ETA: Or better yet a clearer statement that nothing about this is clear.

deleted 13d ago
[deleted]

gregjw 14d ago

sigh

applfanboysbgon 14d ago

> and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well,” a company spokesperson shared Did anyone else think "what the fuck did I just read" after this sentence? Did Matt write it himself while posing as a "spokesperson"? This reads like that time Trump wrote in pseudonymously to a newspaper about how amazing and perfect Trump was. Oh, I hadn't finished reading. The whole article is a WTF did I just read.

deleted 13d ago
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glenstein 13d ago
I think most people aren't reading the article and are not appreciating how insane this story is. But you're right the whole thing I could barely believe what was happening there.
ValentineC 13d ago
There are a lot of sycophants posting in the comment threads here and on Reddit. If you look up their career histories on LinkedIn, some of them are rising pretty quickly within the Automattic ranks.

greatgib 14d ago

What is curious is that there is very little "leak" from insiders regarding what is going on, how employees are living this joke level management.

MBCook 14d ago
I can’t help but think that’s because they don’t know any better and maybe because they’re getting better informed by the reporting than what they’re actually getting from management. Which would be terrible if true.
pyrale 13d ago
there has been two rounds of cash offers for dissenters to leave. People staying are probably not the kind that will publicly raise the issue.

yieldcrv 14d ago

Dont these no-code chasing marketing teams have other ways of building their leadgen ponzi schemes instead of bothering with Wordpress by now?

mitxela 13d ago
I heard that scamming people by feeding false info to chatgpt works now: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/221056/warning-openai-made-me-lose-money-https-paragonvps-com https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/221056/warning-openai-made...
- yieldcrv 13d ago
  signin wall so can’t read, but doesn’t sound like what I’m referring to

deleted 14d ago

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throwaway463645 14d ago

I'm not involved at all in WP, but one thing that I've noticed is that when people talk about Matt Mullenweg online, it's apparently alright to call him mentally ill, scum, unhinged, wish him harm, cheer his setbacks, etc etc. I've actually never seen anything like it. Is this what the WP community are like? I think that would break me too. Microsoft has done plenty of awful things in its day, but I've never seen people diagnose Steve Ballmer with mental disorders and wish him harm, let alone that would become just the accepted majoritarian narrative around him, as it seems to be around Matt Mullenweg. It seems wild. More broadly, why is there a 'WP drama' sub-Reddit? Why are there blogs documenting all of this with glee? Why are people registering domains to post screeds about this? In other words, why has a cottage industry sprung up around - as far as I can tell - bullying Matt Mullenweg? I don't know what to make of it. Who are the WP community, that this is how they engage? Is there some big 4chan-WordPress overlap I'm not aware of? Is this an outgrowth of teenage faux-radicalism off Tumblr? I genuinely don't know, but it seems very off-putting. If this is what the WP community are like, I sure wouldn't want to become involved in it.

bigyabai 13d ago
> I'm not involved at all in WP That's an oddly specific thing to clarify upfront.
earthdeity 13d ago
The first meaningful internet presence he had was the whole WP engine debacle, which seemed to be a pretty ill-advised thing to do from a legal standpoint and also upset the open source community, who are rightly concerned about that sort of thing. Some of the actions taken then broke a number of small sites, upsetting those users. Overall, you've got a baseline reasonable number of pissed off hobbyists with internet presences. Microsoft has had its controversies, but the reason the interest became personal here is it seems this was his own initiative (he kicked everything off with a public blog post). And once again in this case, it looks like a bunch of chaotic behaviour centred on the individual more-so than standard "unpopular corporate decision making". That sort of thing has a big PR blast radius and has exposed him to criticism more than necessary (or normal). Given how avoidable the above is (by simply operating through his lawyers / the organisation), it's feeding speculation on his mental state.

dcmatt 14d ago

Looks like he was just at Burning Man so this behavior tracks. https://ma.tt/2026/09/bm-snaps/ https://ma.tt/2026/09/bm-snaps/

bawolff 14d ago

I don't say this lightly, but this sounds like someone going through a mental health crisis.

xyst 13d ago
No, he's just an asshole
- user_7832 13d ago
  I mean, both can be true at the same time. For a slightly controversial example, look at Kanye. If you knew him before he got off his rocker (especially the 2000s), he was a very different person than who he has become today.
  - KingMob 13d ago
    In Kanye's case, I think: 1. He should probably go back on his bipolar medication, even if he feels less creative on it. 2. Paying for the surgery his mother died during really messed up his head. Partly because he probably blames himself, partly because she was one of the few stabilizing influences in his life. He really started going downhill after. He might have always been impulsive-grandstanding-interrupt-Taylor-Swift Kanye, but it's conceivable he wouldn't have morphed into slavery-is-a-state-of-mind-"i-love-hitler"-antisemitic Kanye. Sigh. "I miss the old Kanye." Time to give 808s and Heartbreak a re-listen.
JumpCrisscross 13d ago
> someone going through a mental health crisis Or coming down from amphetamines.
micromacrofoot 13d ago
all the oligarchs are doing it these days

KPGv2 13d ago

Anytime I read anything about this guy, Automattic, or Wordpress, I—a Tumblr user—get the nervous sweats about my beloved shayla.

Aeolun 13d ago

Matt is of the opinion that if they’re going to try and take his thing he might as well burn it down, isn’t he xD

raverbashing 13d ago
Yeah. Sounds like this is no longer Automattic for the People
- ValentineC 13d ago
  When was Automattic ever "for the people"?
  - duskwuff 13d ago
    1992. (It's a music joke.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_for_the_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_for_the_People

xyst 13d ago

It surprises me to no end that people continue working for this lunatic. When this company was offering an early severance, I am surprised only 159 took the offer [1]. Per cited article, this was 8.4% of the total workforce. Apparently there was even a second severance offer at around the same time of the CEO's legal fight with WP Engine [2]. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/159-employees-are-leaving-automattic-as-ceos-fight-with-wp-engine-escalates/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/159-employees-are-leaving-... [2] https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-matt-mullenweg/ https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-ma...

ExoticPearTree 13d ago

This and previous submission about the Automattic board attempt to fire the founder should be used as a lesson that you should never ever give up control of your company to anyone. Facebook is a good example on how to structure your company to keep control of it.

johannes1234321 13d ago
As fou der - yes. The question is if investors accept that gamble. Facebook, when, Meta took a bunch of bad decisions in recentyears. All that Metaverse is just a write off ... for now the stock market liked the "vision" but that may end. How willing investor's then are to play such a game is to be seen. I guess this only works in exceptional cases. Facebook was a money printing machine everybody wanted to be a part of.
scheme271 13d ago
And FB is a lesson to a lot of companies and the public not to allow the same dual class stock structure. Zuckerberg can cash out a lot of his equity and still be the controlling force behind FB even though other people "own" a majority stake of the stocks and equity.
SecretDreams 13d ago
> Facebook is a good example on how to structure your company to keep control of it. Yes, there's a lot of lessons we can take away from Facebook. Most are not positive lessons, mind you.
mrguyorama 13d ago
Is your implication that the world is a better place if it is impossible to remove someone like Matt from control of a company?
- ExoticPearTree 13d ago
  No, I said it would be better for the founder to not be put in a position where he/she can be fired.

program 13d ago

[flagged]

youre-wrong3 13d ago
[dead]
dgellow 13d ago
That’s all nice, but what does that have to do with the article?
jeltz 13d ago
So do you have any comment on the article or are you just here to promote Automattic?
bubba99 13d ago
Very thoughtful comment, so what?

catoc 13d ago

Sounds chaoticc

keiferski 13d ago

I hope someone eventually does a deep-dive on the organizational structure of WordPress and how much of a mess it is. As someone that’s pretty much worked in/with WP for my entire career, it’s always seemed like the worst of both worlds - distributed and slow-moving, yet still ultimately controlled to a massive extent by a single individual. These kinds of absurd situations just slowly push people toward Shopify, other CMSes, etc. There will be no grand exodus, because too many companies are intertwined to the WP ecosystem. But combined with AI, the horrible design of Gutenberg, and half a dozen other things, I really worry for the future of WP. At this point I generally only recommend it to people that need something extremely customized. Other platforms are easier to use and don’t have the soap opera drama.

thebiglebrewski 13d ago
oh yeah, Shopify isn't also ultimately controlled by a single individual /s. Try Solidus for something controlled by a community!
- keiferski 13d ago
  Shopify is a public company and thus subject to far more regulations and expected behavior of the CEO. I also specifically did not merely say that being controlled by one person was bad, but that it was bad in the context of also being slow at decision making. In many cases having a single decision maker is a must for being dynamic. Haven’t heard of Solidus, but I’ll check it out.
  - KingMob 13d ago
    Regulations maybe, but CEO expectations? Doesn't seem to be happening. Shopify's CEO was in the news just recently for arguing that rich people should be able to cast more votes. That's the most naked anti-democracy stance I've heard in ages. (And this is before we get into funding "deport-the-foreigners-and-minorities" DHH's Omarchy.)
- dakolli 13d ago
  Or just don't use these hacky solutions and just make a gd ecom website. It's 2026, use claude if you have too. There is no reason for shopify to exist (or wordpress for that matter, but at least wordpress isn't for profit). They say AI should kill SaaS, but it should actually kill all these dumb abstraction PaaS. I say this as someone who has recently helped a few friends move their ecom stores off shopify, and wow, I didn't know such a horrible paradigm could exist. I genuinely think it would be easier for someone to learn a web stack in 2026 than learn to piece together whatever spaghetti monster shopify, and similar hacks are.

hypfer 13d ago

From an outsiders perspective, Matt's claims of comment sections like this one being heavily astroturfed do sound somewhat credible. Every single one of them I saw so far has the same bad faith attacks, claiming that that guy's mental health would be compromised - and then nothing else other than implying that corporate processes are correct and you are to shut up. Are there real people with opinions about this? I'd like to hear them.

bayindirh 13d ago
I mean, this is not his first rodeo at that and our not first watch of these power struggles. He's clinging to what he has, and for any outsider this (or the path leading to this) doesn't look like healthy behavior. What we live through life can trigger extremely strange behaviors we didn't see before from people, so I don't think all of this can be attributed to astroturfing. Every comment section on the internet is a target for astroturfing, yet attribute everything to it, is not right.
- hypfer 13d ago
  Uh you've just now said the same in slightly different words, then closed with "you're wrong" spoken through a corporate filter. Which.. kinda doesn't really convince me. But anyway > He's clinging to what he has, and [..] this [..] doesn't look like healthy behavior. That's not something I would agree with. Can you explain why you believe that protecting "your baby" and clinging to it is seen by you as "not healthy"? From my understanding of the world, that is very healthy. Why not?
Macha 13d ago
This seems pretty easily explainable by Matt’s actions appearing to be hypocritical and antithetical to the views of people likely to comment on Internet message boards. People value stability from infrastructure providers and Matt’s antics with wordpress.org during the WPEngine dispute salted the earth for his chances of getting support in a board dispute. Even Matt’s own previous posting here did him no favours. Sometimes a broadly one sided reaction is just a broadly one sided reaction, no conspiracy needed.

paulbjensen 13d ago

He who controls the Slack, controls the (Wordpress) universe.

pwillia7 13d ago
a ban for a ban makes the whole world permabanned

achenet 13d ago

I can't help but read this and be reminded of what Steve Albini said about refusing a major label contract with Big Black: > If you don't use contracts, you don't have any contracts to worry about. If you don't have a tour rider, you don't have a tour rider to argue about. If you don't have a booking agent, you don't have a booking agent to argue with. > To us, every moment we remained unfettered and in control was a success. We never had a manager. We never had a booking agent. We never had a lawyer. We never took an advance from a record company. We booked our own tours, paid our own bills, made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences. The results of that methodology speak for themselves: Nobody ever told us what to do, and nobody took any of our money. If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.

pessimizer 13d ago
He also didn't make a living, and record companies took his style and used it to generate billions. His income came from his studio, production work, and being a celebrity. I was just having a discussion about this with a friend who watched an NYU hosted debate in the 90s between the guy I can't remember from Sick Of It All and Sam McPheeters from Born Against. Born Against had been trolling Sick Of It All for ages (because it was fun), putting up posters, passing out fliers around their shows and talking about them for signing to a major label and distributor, and especially for censoring their lyric sheet in order to get sold at Walmart. Born Against was traditional DIY, on Sam's record label (Vermiform), didn't have bar codes on their records, mostly mailorder, etc. Both were right, McPheeters was right that Sick Of It All had sold out and censored themselves in order to fit into corporate commerce, but the guy from Sick Of It All was more right. His position was that Born Against (like a Steve Albini) were rich middle class kids who were just having fun, and Sick Of It All were from working class families that they had to support. Music can be the most important thing for hobbyists, but that kind of music is just music. They on the other hand were looking for a ticket to a better life, and one that allowed them to do what they were good at and what they enjoyed. So Born Against and their style ended up aped by the corporations, and spreads into emocore and all that shit, makes the companies billions, and Sam McPheeters ends up with zero of that. He's fine, he's writing columns for the Atlantic and doing interviews with NPR (incidentally because wealthy people pay to be close to "cool" people.) Meanwhile the style of music represented by Sick Of It All pretty much runs its course, but the members pocket a bunch of cash, and get to move on to do whatever else they want. Purity is a privilege of the already wealthy. A lot of people chose Wordpress because it was the cheapest functional option (Free.) They were not interested in writing their own CMS, and couldn't afford to anyway. > If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you. Also in respect to Mullenweg, afaik he owns 84% of the company. This never had a chance without his consent.

JumpCrisscross 13d ago

https://archive.is/ce24M https://archive.is/ce24M

leetrout 13d ago

Can we put "Automattic" I. The title? I had no idea who this was. (Yes it is comfortable under my rock)

ubermonkey 13d ago

This is going to get very entertainingly ugly, I suspect.

lenerdenator 13d ago

Yet another failure of corporate governance in this industry. If you can pull a bunch of shenanigans to get around being fired by your bosses, then the system isn't working.

ryukoposting 13d ago

> ctrl+f > photomatt ...hmm. Guess we'll just have to wait a couple hours.

wahhselfishceo 13d ago

[dead]

chuckadams 13d ago

> Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.” Uhhh, that's not normal... is it?

pessimizer 13d ago

They were hoping he'd just accept it and walk away with infinite money and zero responsibilities. But he really likes being boss and really loves attention. Try again in 3 years. Although I guarantee they would run it into the ground without him. I just have a feeling. The people going after Mullenweg are not backseat drivers, they're backseat critics. They have no idea how to drive, they just know when other people are doing it wrong. If you don't want people like Mullenweg treating your business like a toy, try not having an internet monoculture. There were plenty of competitors to Wordpress that didn't have an insane database schema, but web programmers are herd animals. Somehow they made the only competitor with traction Drupal, which was way worse. You all chose to hitch your wagon to Mullenweg (and DHH for that matter), now it's their wagon. They both also made it easy to fork at any time, which is evidence that their enemies are parasites imo. Mullenweg is literally fighting private equity that doesn't want to host their own infrastructure because it wouldn't be profitable, but they also don't want to contribute. And the internet cries for them, because the internet was looking for a bargain.

ValentineC 13d ago
> If you don't want people like Mullenweg treating your business like a toy, try not having an internet monoculture. There were plenty of competitors to Wordpress that didn't have an insane database schema, but web programmers are herd animals. There were many other decent competitors when WordPress was first forked like Movable Type and Textpattern. Many people I know also used LiveJournal and their forks heavily, and of course there was the Blogger crowd. For CMS, there was PHPNuke, PostNuke, Joomla, Mambo, but they were all for "professional" website developers, not for people unfamiliar with web development and just looking to muck around. I think WordPress took off mainly because the web crowd rallied around it for their then-good design and taste. Plugins and "good enough" themes were another moat — I think it helped that plugins let people install just enough rope to hang themselves with (or: they get to decide the level of complexity they're comfortable with), unlike the ready-built CMSes which bundled everything and the kitchen sink. Now, I have no idea why most of the early WordPress community chose to rally around and elevate Matt Mullenweg, but I personally think he wrote well and had good taste back in the days.

brachkow 13d ago

Company is called AutoMATTic, btw