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Automattic's Board Forces CEO Matt Mullenweg Into Leave of Absence (techcrunch.com) 38

Posted by BeauHD from the what's-going-on dept.
Automattic's board has placed founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence against his will, with CFO Mark Davies taking over as interim CEO. The reason for the move remains unclear, but it follows years of legal fights, layoffs, employee departures, and controversy surrounding Mullenweg's leadership. TechCrunch reports: Earlier Wednesday, Mullenweg posted in a Slack channel visible to all employees that the company's chief financial officer, Mark Davies, had "conspired" with other board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker to vote to put Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence.

The message read: "And the biggest news: I won't be able to make the [meeting] tomorrow. @Mark Davies has conspired with @Ann Dunwoody, @Toni, and @Sue Decker behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that. Wishing Mark and all of you the very best. To clarify @Mark Davies was voted as interim CEO. I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied."

A Slack message to the open source WordPress.org community from the project's executive director, Mary Hubbard, also confirmed Mullenweg's change of status at the commercial company. However, Hubbard said that WordPress.org was not impacted. "Matt remains the leader of the WordPress project and I remain Executive Director of WordPress. Our teams, priorities, and work continue as planned," she wrote.

Automattic's Board Forces CEO Matt Mullenweg Into Leave of Absence More | Reply

Automattic's Board Forces CEO Matt Mullenweg Into Leave of Absence

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  • well (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Couldn't have happened to a nicer person. Smallest violin...

    • Matt Mullenweg has done a lot for free and open source software as a communication platform, so it has been sad to see all this play out (crossing my fingers not as badly as with Ian Murdock of Debian though). Here are some health-related suggestions I've collected that may be useful for him or anyone else who can be hyper-focused and spend too much time indoors and on the computer and not emphasize good nutrition and exercise and face-to-face community so on:
      https://github.com/pdfernhout/... [github.com]

      That said, and

  • Two wrongs (Score:3)

    by Unpopular Opinions ( 6836218 ) on Thursday September 10, 2026 @01:09PM (#66332602)

    Are apparently trying to make a right in the WP world?

  • but they've made it nearly impossible for them to be dislodged

  • Automattic and WP Engine now have the same problem (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Thursday September 10, 2026 @01:29PM (#66332624)

    WordPress is basically designed, last I checked, to be entirely dependent on WordPress.org's infrastructure. That infrastructure is Matt's petty little fiefdom. That's how updates, plugins, themes, etc. are normally delivered to the users.

    This is why WordPress should have created a real governance board a long time ago or formally submitted to the ASF or CNCF so that there'd be adults in the room who could punt someone like Matt if he decided to weaponize the FOSS infrastructure to punish a commercial rival.

    This isn't even a license problem or anything like that. It's a simple case of one man who has way too much leverage over the entire ecosystem of a major FOSS project.

    • Re:Automattic and WP Engine now have the same prob (Score:5, Interesting)

      by machineghost ( 622031 ) on Thursday September 10, 2026 @04:25PM (#66332866)

      It's not quite *that* simple.

      In OSS, *anyone* can fork the code. If it was as simple as "the original creator is doing stupid/terrible things", everyone involved could fork and start contributing to the fork (anyone ever hear of a little database called MySQL ... which is now more popularly known as MariaDB?)

      But this isn't just about OSS code, it's about the corporation. It's that corporation that is the root of the entire problem.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        But who would want to fork wordpress? It evolved into a horrible mess and a rewrite is cheaper. And there are alternatives you can build on so you don't need to rewrite wordpress. WordPress is only relevant for websites that still rely on it. For new websites choose any sane alternative.

      • anyone ever hear of a little database called MySQL ... which is now more popularly known as MariaDB

        MySQL/MariaDB is a product. Wordpress is a platform which has an associated product built on it, and its popularity and features are dependent on external infrastructure. For the product to be feature compatible it needs compatible infrastructure, that's the point. Unless you clone the entire Wordpress.org infrastructure and ecosystem, and user base, forking the code of Wordpress itself is pretty damn useless.

        And one person has too much leverage over the things that make Wordpress useful (and that is not Wo

      • Anyone could fork Wordpress and a whole suite of useful addons any time if they felt qualified. But then what they would have is the responsibility to not only maintain a fork of fucking garbage Wordpress, and also a bunch of other software, but also continue to make it viable without wordpress.com. And what's your prize? A lot of people expecting to migrate from Wordpress and wanting to pay you nothing.

        People who want to customize an OSS CMS are using Drupal. Most people using Wordpress don't want to learn

        • code that is long gone because Drupal is now Symfony-based and the way you do basically everything has changed since I knew how to do anything meaningful, back in version 7 or so.

          Breaking backward compatibility was Drupal's fatal flaw. Not only are old modules incompatible with new versions, the core database needs a migration to go to the next version after D7, and Drupal does not provide this migration.

  • Oh, you can't do this to me. I started this company. You know how much I sacrificed!

    • Oh, you can't do this to me. I started this company. You know how much I sacrificed!

      I'm confused: did he become a villain when he started the company, or was it before that? Was it what or who that was sacrificed?

  • Automattic's Board Forces CEO Matt Mullenweg Into Leave of Absence

    It had to be done manually. :-)

  • Too little too late (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CEC-P ( 10248912 ) on Thursday September 10, 2026 @02:14PM (#66332710)
    The guy is a hot-headed train wreck that gets offended by everything, makes every business decision personal, and will burn the company down to save his ego. He should have been gone 3 years ago. I've never seen someone who deserves their job and title less than this clown.

  • He acts like he's not the problem. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by toxonix ( 1793960 ) on Thursday September 10, 2026 @02:22PM (#66332716)

    When all the people you work with don't like you, maybe you're the problem.

    • All the people who work with Matt Mullenweg don't like him? Let's look at this with a little bit of thought. When the tensions escalated around his standoff with WP Engine, he offered a special buyout package to any employee that wanted to leave. 159 employees accepted the buyout offer amounting to 8.9 percent of the staff. What you're suggesting is that 91.1 percent of the staff stayed to work there despite not liking him or his practices. The number is much more nuanced than your simplistic representatio

      • (generic gender) dude, have you even worked at a company before?

        It's incredibly common to have people work at a place despite despising the CEO. I suspect that's actually the default. In the last 20 years, I've worked in exactly one place where I liked or admired the CEO, and a bunch of places, including my current employer, where I was fairly allergic to the CEO.

      • Who urinated in your Golden Grahams this morning? Is your name Mullenweg?
        "Some employees said they were “ecstatic” or “relieved,” but others had mixed emotions because the move creates more instability." - tfa
        Guide the ship. Don't piss into the wind and get the crew wet. If you do that, they should make you walk the plank.

      • Disliking the CEO or not being thrilled with the direction he's taking the company would have to be really extreme to result in 9 percent of the workforce choosing to leave. toxonix's comment isn't egregious. And like someone else said, it is more uncommon to like the CEO of a company where you work than to dislike them. That's what I've observed (me and most other employees).
        This is a sad situation. MM did much good work for many years.
  • not to email his termination to him. He even got to vote, he was outvoted. How many employees even get a vote if they are going to get canned.

  • Pocket Casts was unimproved around the time it was acquired. The UI was simple and effective.

    I recently had to limit battery usage to foreground only because it was using a stupid amount of the battery charge.

  • Just imagine if Matt took WordPress away from all of his opponents. Suppose he shuttered the project completely.

    Can you imagine? No more WordPress. What a great day that would be.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xevioso ( 598654 )

      It's open source? It could be ... forked? No one wants to do that because it's a big deal, but I don't see why theat wouldn't be ont he table if he threatened to essentially try to shut the project down...

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