11 ms·

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

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 12d ago
That company sounds like a clusterfuck. Good luck attracting good talent with such dysfunctional leadership.
- saghm 12d 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 12d 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_ 12d 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 12d ago
      One thing is doing it in a public forum and another is an enterprise product that you contracted poaching your own employees
      - m4rtink 12d ago
        Not sure how effective the poaching will be with the company in this state.
  - newtonianrules 12d ago
    People pay $100k/mo for fucking Wordpress in 2026?
    - sixtyj 12d ago
      News sites can be very large - so running on Wordpress.com infrastructure can cause such amount. With cloud storage (provided by WP), additional support etc.
    - shakna 12d ago
      Some Wordpress clients are government, with all the scale and always-on-call requirements that entails.
    - KingMob 12d ago
      Because they're not paying only for Wordpress-the-software, they're paying for scalability, maintenance, etc. $100k/mo is probably cheaper than a team of high-end WP experts. Same reason a ton of us pay for AWS/GCloud/Azure instead of dealing with bare metal. (And I say this as someone running an edge fleet. If I didn't need to, I wouldn't.)
  - TiredOfLife 12d ago
    Humans are not cattle
  - fergie 12d ago
    Its called "free movement of labor" and its a very good thing. Arguably the reason that Silicon Valley happened in the first place.
  - stavros 12d ago
    It's not poaching to post an ad that someone who works elsewhere happens to see.
  - redsocksfan45 12d ago
    [dead]
  - bityard 12d ago
    That doesn't sound like poaching to me? I mean, if it's a public endpoint, the person who finds it could be an independent contractor hired to work on the site, or a random person on the Internet probing the site for fun. What you describe sounds more like a cleverly hidden ad. Google and others were famous for this during silicon valley's growth phase when you could get a job as a software engineer if you had heard of Java in passing and could fog a mirror. Intent matters: a hiring campaign doesn't rise to the level of poaching unless there is some concerted effort to attract specific employees and/or talent from a specific company. Finally, poaching is a perjorative term, but the practice of hiring another company's talent (even if they are a competitor) is not illegal or unethical. Companies SHOULD have to compete against each other for top talent.
- subarctic 12d ago
  Too bad because they have some incredible products
  - stackghost 12d ago
    All I know is Wordpress and Beeper, are any of their other products good? Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
    - jimmydddd 12d ago
      Not an enterprise product, but SimpleNote is great. I was happy that they bought it.
      - dofm 12d ago
        Matt famously used it himself and bought them the domain name (which was expensive) and gave it to them no-strings-attached. A more optimistic, less chaotic and exasperating time.
      - rurp 12d ago
        SimpleNote is outstanding. I've gone through countless note apps over the years and this was the only one that stuck long term. Every other option was either too complex for what I needed, got enshittified, or needless UX churn broke my workflow to an unacceptable degree.
    - sphars 12d ago
      I'm a fan of PocketCasts as my podcast app on Android. It was bought by Automattic in 2021.
      - ab5tract 12d ago
        TIL! Am I crazy or was it at one point partly owned by NPR?
        12d ago
- darylteo 12d ago
  Eh, it's not a seller's market anymore.
x0x0 12d ago
Holy shit. You are, if anything, underselling the article. > 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.” 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.” And like all well-run companies, it's not clear who the ceo is.
- tyre 12d ago
  This sounds like a mental breakdown.
  - schnebbau 12d ago
    No, it just sounds like a troll.
    - prox 12d ago
      Could very well be a venn diagram here
    - weego 12d ago
      Sounds like someone's been taking drinking the Musk Koolaid
    - BobaFloutist 12d ago
      Right, but choosing to troll the company you own because the board fired you for repeatedly, extremely publicly "Having a normal one", looks a lot like a mental breakdown of some sort.
  - CPLX 12d ago
    The whole fucking Valley has been out of their mind on prescription amphetamines for at least a decade. The most visible people like Matt and Elon and a few others have the most visible effects but breakdowns like this are happening hourly with less fanfare. See if you can think of any other interesting historical events that happened when the whole leadership and rank and file were on prescription amphetamines.
htrp 12d ago
It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him).
- palmotea 12d ago
  > It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him). So what happens when the courts get involved? Because "he won, because he was the only one with the passwords," seems like a software engineer fantasy.
  - tinco 12d ago
    It's a true power struggle. As a software engineer I have actually fallen into the trap of thinking that because of the law or a contract something would happen. It is a softer power than I expected. The board wants to make money, that's why they hold shares and positions. If Mullenweg has the power to destroy value, that will be powerful leverage over them. If his employees side with him, if he holds the accounts, they'll have to negotiate carefully. Of course, you would need a lawyer to determine when this crosses from a civil dispute to a criminal dispute because at some point him using the keys when he's not authorized could be a crime and if they can get the cops involved that certainly changes the dynamic.
    - mitxela 12d ago
      It's already criminal from the sound of it
      - jeltz 12d ago
        Yeah, but I am doubtful that the board wants to involve the police.
        JumpCrisscross 12d ago
dgellow 12d ago
I cannot read the article, thanks for summarizing. > Something went wrong. Disable your adblocker on TechCrunch. It looks like your adblocker is attempting to interfere with the intended operation of this site. Please add us to your adblocker's allowlist. Click below for instructions. Yeah, not a chance I disable an adblocker for TechCrunch slop reporting
cmiles8 12d ago
Agree… the article doesn’t make it clear that he’s really back, just that he has taken control of key company assets like the company Slack and is saying he’s back. I don’t think this is over until the board releases a statement. CEOs can pontificate all they want but at the end of the day the board is legally in charge of and the final say at a company. 99.99% of the time it’s just the CEO saying everything and the board quietly giving their blessing out of view. This is the 0.01% where everyone actually wants the board to speak, loudly and clearly.
- JumpCrisscross 12d ago
  > he has taken control of key company assets like the company Slack and is saying he’s back To be clear, Matt seems to have stolen Automattic's assets. That drops into several categories of shareholder lawsuit and potentially criminal behaviour.
pavlov 12d ago
Didn’t this happen at ARM China? The board of the parent ARM company fired him. He just kept going like the China unit was his company. I don’t know how that ended.
- irthomasthomas 12d ago
  It took them two years to finally get him out with the help of the government in Shenzhen https://www.nme.com/news/arm-china-finally-ousts-rogue-ceo-two-years-after-first-attempt-3215746 https://www.nme.com/news/arm-china-finally-ousts-rogue-ceo-t...
  - donalhunt 12d ago
    And this is why building governance out of a pack of cards is a risky business... If you cannot escalate a governance issue to a higher power, the controls are not worth the paper they are written on.
  - MadrasTh0rn 12d ago
    Wait China pulled off a coup inside ARM?
browningstreet 12d ago
It would help if the journalist/bloggers at Techcrunch published article headlines that accurately reflected the story they themselves wrote.
- hydhyd 12d ago
  In many news organizations--certainly newspapers, potentially an outfit as big as TechCrunch--headlines are typically not written by the authors themselves but instead by an (copy)editor. Many times journalists are unhappy with the headline that an article ultimately runs with.
mizzao 12d ago
Control of the money, the software infrastructure, and social support is key to a coup. Legal correctness is very weak leverage. Similar to a government coup where you need to control the money and the military.

stackghost 12d ago

That company sounds like a clusterfuck. Good luck attracting good talent with such dysfunctional leadership.

saghm 12d 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 12d 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_ 12d 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 12d ago
    One thing is doing it in a public forum and another is an enterprise product that you contracted poaching your own employees
    - m4rtink 12d ago
      Not sure how effective the poaching will be with the company in this state.
- newtonianrules 12d ago
  People pay $100k/mo for fucking Wordpress in 2026?
  - sixtyj 12d ago
    News sites can be very large - so running on Wordpress.com infrastructure can cause such amount. With cloud storage (provided by WP), additional support etc.
  - shakna 12d ago
    Some Wordpress clients are government, with all the scale and always-on-call requirements that entails.
  - KingMob 12d ago
    Because they're not paying only for Wordpress-the-software, they're paying for scalability, maintenance, etc. $100k/mo is probably cheaper than a team of high-end WP experts. Same reason a ton of us pay for AWS/GCloud/Azure instead of dealing with bare metal. (And I say this as someone running an edge fleet. If I didn't need to, I wouldn't.)
- TiredOfLife 12d ago
  Humans are not cattle
- fergie 12d ago
  Its called "free movement of labor" and its a very good thing. Arguably the reason that Silicon Valley happened in the first place.
- stavros 12d ago
  It's not poaching to post an ad that someone who works elsewhere happens to see.
- redsocksfan45 12d ago
  [dead]
- bityard 12d ago
  That doesn't sound like poaching to me? I mean, if it's a public endpoint, the person who finds it could be an independent contractor hired to work on the site, or a random person on the Internet probing the site for fun. What you describe sounds more like a cleverly hidden ad. Google and others were famous for this during silicon valley's growth phase when you could get a job as a software engineer if you had heard of Java in passing and could fog a mirror. Intent matters: a hiring campaign doesn't rise to the level of poaching unless there is some concerted effort to attract specific employees and/or talent from a specific company. Finally, poaching is a perjorative term, but the practice of hiring another company's talent (even if they are a competitor) is not illegal or unethical. Companies SHOULD have to compete against each other for top talent.
subarctic 12d ago
Too bad because they have some incredible products
- stackghost 12d ago
  All I know is Wordpress and Beeper, are any of their other products good? Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
  - jimmydddd 12d ago
    Not an enterprise product, but SimpleNote is great. I was happy that they bought it.
    - dofm 12d ago
      Matt famously used it himself and bought them the domain name (which was expensive) and gave it to them no-strings-attached. A more optimistic, less chaotic and exasperating time.
    - rurp 12d ago
      SimpleNote is outstanding. I've gone through countless note apps over the years and this was the only one that stuck long term. Every other option was either too complex for what I needed, got enshittified, or needless UX churn broke my workflow to an unacceptable degree.
  - sphars 12d ago
    I'm a fan of PocketCasts as my podcast app on Android. It was bought by Automattic in 2021.
    - ab5tract 12d ago
      TIL! Am I crazy or was it at one point partly owned by NPR?
      - 12d ago
darylteo 12d ago
Eh, it's not a seller's market anymore.

x0x0 12d ago

Holy shit. You are, if anything, underselling the article. > 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.” 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.” And like all well-run companies, it's not clear who the ceo is.

tyre 12d ago
This sounds like a mental breakdown.
- schnebbau 12d ago
  No, it just sounds like a troll.
  - prox 12d ago
    Could very well be a venn diagram here
  - weego 12d ago
    Sounds like someone's been taking drinking the Musk Koolaid
  - BobaFloutist 12d ago
    Right, but choosing to troll the company you own because the board fired you for repeatedly, extremely publicly "Having a normal one", looks a lot like a mental breakdown of some sort.
- CPLX 12d ago
  The whole fucking Valley has been out of their mind on prescription amphetamines for at least a decade. The most visible people like Matt and Elon and a few others have the most visible effects but breakdowns like this are happening hourly with less fanfare. See if you can think of any other interesting historical events that happened when the whole leadership and rank and file were on prescription amphetamines.

htrp 12d ago

It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him).

palmotea 12d ago
> It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him). So what happens when the courts get involved? Because "he won, because he was the only one with the passwords," seems like a software engineer fantasy.
- tinco 12d ago
  It's a true power struggle. As a software engineer I have actually fallen into the trap of thinking that because of the law or a contract something would happen. It is a softer power than I expected. The board wants to make money, that's why they hold shares and positions. If Mullenweg has the power to destroy value, that will be powerful leverage over them. If his employees side with him, if he holds the accounts, they'll have to negotiate carefully. Of course, you would need a lawyer to determine when this crosses from a civil dispute to a criminal dispute because at some point him using the keys when he's not authorized could be a crime and if they can get the cops involved that certainly changes the dynamic.
  - mitxela 12d ago
    It's already criminal from the sound of it
    - jeltz 12d ago
      Yeah, but I am doubtful that the board wants to involve the police.
      - JumpCrisscross 12d ago

dgellow 12d ago

I cannot read the article, thanks for summarizing. > Something went wrong. Disable your adblocker on TechCrunch. It looks like your adblocker is attempting to interfere with the intended operation of this site. Please add us to your adblocker's allowlist. Click below for instructions. Yeah, not a chance I disable an adblocker for TechCrunch slop reporting

cmiles8 12d ago

Agree… the article doesn’t make it clear that he’s really back, just that he has taken control of key company assets like the company Slack and is saying he’s back. I don’t think this is over until the board releases a statement. CEOs can pontificate all they want but at the end of the day the board is legally in charge of and the final say at a company. 99.99% of the time it’s just the CEO saying everything and the board quietly giving their blessing out of view. This is the 0.01% where everyone actually wants the board to speak, loudly and clearly.

JumpCrisscross 12d ago
> he has taken control of key company assets like the company Slack and is saying he’s back To be clear, Matt seems to have stolen Automattic's assets. That drops into several categories of shareholder lawsuit and potentially criminal behaviour.

pavlov 12d ago

Didn’t this happen at ARM China? The board of the parent ARM company fired him. He just kept going like the China unit was his company. I don’t know how that ended.

irthomasthomas 12d ago
It took them two years to finally get him out with the help of the government in Shenzhen https://www.nme.com/news/arm-china-finally-ousts-rogue-ceo-two-years-after-first-attempt-3215746 https://www.nme.com/news/arm-china-finally-ousts-rogue-ceo-t...
- donalhunt 12d ago
  And this is why building governance out of a pack of cards is a risky business... If you cannot escalate a governance issue to a higher power, the controls are not worth the paper they are written on.
- MadrasTh0rn 12d ago
  Wait China pulled off a coup inside ARM?

browningstreet 12d ago

It would help if the journalist/bloggers at Techcrunch published article headlines that accurately reflected the story they themselves wrote.

hydhyd 12d ago
In many news organizations--certainly newspapers, potentially an outfit as big as TechCrunch--headlines are typically not written by the authors themselves but instead by an (copy)editor. Many times journalists are unhappy with the headline that an article ultimately runs with.

mizzao 12d ago

Control of the money, the software infrastructure, and social support is key to a coup. Legal correctness is very weak leverage. Similar to a government coup where you need to control the money and the military.