Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
techcrunch.com242 points by LeoPanthera 9 hours ago
242 points by LeoPanthera 9 hours ago
> “And the biggest news: I won't be able to make the ELT tomorrow,” Matt wrote in an Announcement Slack. He continued, writing that Mark Davies, current Automattic Chief Financial Officer, has “conspired” with Automattic Board of Directors members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.”
If you’re doing this type of accusation in the company wide announcements channel, odds are you’re never coming back. A board coup rarely happens without a good reason, but a “leave of absence” isn’t a firing. It’s still pretty bad, but it’s not a firing. However, crashing out and waging war on the board will lead to that outcome.
In recent memory of companies I've worked for, even the absolute WORST executives haven't gotten fired. They always announce that "it's time for another adventure" or "I am taking a break". So I am not shocked they didn't fire him, although the board is now probably wishing they did.
Had a President make a big ordeal about leaving "for health reasons". His LinkedIn had him at a new company within a couple months doing the same thing.
Had a CISO leave for "personal" reasons. Talked to him a couple years later and yeah, he was fired.
Steal 20$ out of a cash register and make the local news. Waste a billion dollars at a corp and make insane decisions and ride out on a golden parachute. Its a fucked up world.
In fairness, I don't think stealing $20 makes the local news these days, unless you live in a town of 300 people. There's a lot of antisocial behavior that goes unreported.
But moreover: I guess there's a presumption, whether fair or not, that well-paid executives overseen by wealthy boards of directors are pre-vetted and act in good faith, whether or not those actions pan out and make money; versus robbery or violent crime that people recoil from, that assumption of good faith isn't there, because it's self-evident to ordinary people that there is no justification for such actions.
> I don't think stealing $20 makes the local news these days
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_Emmely
Got fired because she redeemed two orphaned bottle deposit slips worth 1,30€ (in 2009, so more like 1,50€ in today's money /s). Caused a nation-wide discussion.
I would argue there is a broad difference in ethicality and reason between the bottom and top of the food chain, making these examples less clear cut. If your plan as a low level employee doesn't work out you still get fired and the consequences are far greater.
You are comparing robbery with ineptitude. They are two different things. If your ineptitude makes a 20$ loss you may not be fired as well. Billion dollars wasted at corp still is not billion dollars at the exec pockets (that would be theft and he would be facing charges). That the exec pockets millions regardles of the losses incurred by corp, even when it sounds awful to you or to me, is a problem between the corp and the exec.
Robbery and ineptitude are different things, but the situations described by OP are often special blends of the two.
> Steal 20$ out of a cash register and make the local news. Waste a billion dollars at a corp and make insane decisions and ride out on a golden parachute. Its a fucked up world.
I think if we are just looking at the media:
Most journalists wouldn't consider some nobody stealing $20 to be newsworthy in itself.
Most corporate scandals receive extensive media coverage. Even a CEO who was merely incompetent instead of corrupt, is still likely to get some bad press.
Now, you are completely right that the non-media consequences are very different – significant chance of criminal record (although in many jurisdictions, there are mechanisms which first-time offenders on minor charges can use to escape getting one) vs a multi-million dollar severance payment.
The issue with "golden parachutes" – if someone's employment contract creates an entitlement to a severance payment (and in some jurisdictions employment law creates one even if the contract itself doesn't) – then you generally have to pay them unless you terminate for "misconduct" (often even "serious misconduct"). The problem with terminating for "misconduct", is it creates a big incentive for the terminated employee to sue to try to get the severance payment they'd otherwise receive, and the larger the payment, the bigger the motivation – which creates an expensive legal and PR headache. The PR issue is especially acute for senior executives–a junior employee suing over a severance dispute will get a lot less media coverage than a former CEO doing it. So, unless the conduct was extremely egregious, there is a strong incentive for the employer/board to just pay the severance out and make the legal and PR headache go away.
There is also the issue that the next person stepping into their shoes to clean up the mess is being recruited exactly during this time. And if your company gets a reputation for not paying out prenegotiated severances or nitpicking over them, it makes the next candidate that much more wary.
So you would prefer a media circus and investor scrutiny when your employer's executives are fired for failures or misconduct? This is likely to cause the price of the shares to drop, including any ESPP and stock grants you and your coworkers have vested. Is the satisfaction of seeing an executive dragged through the mud worth losing a chunk of your net worth to you, no matter how much the exec deserves it? I'd rather keep the money, personally.
Maybe if there were consequences, there wouldn't be so much corruption that leads to these silent firings.
Satisfaction? It’s about truth and justice, investors deserve to know about executive malfeasance
Yes, I’d prefer that investors know that the new executive is not going to continue the same crap and same level of poor judgement. Want them to know the replacement is looking to do more than wear a golden parachute.
Imagine if investors actually thought the personnel change was a positive one…
> So you would prefer a media circus and investor scrutiny when your employer's executives are fired for failures or misconduct?
Yes, as a warning to the other executives.
Signed,
The Shareholders
> Is the satisfaction of seeing an executive dragged through the mud worth losing a chunk of your net worth to you, no matter how much the exec deserves it?
Yes. There is far too little truth and justice in this world, most especially for corporate executives.
> I'd rather keep the money, personally.
Of course, me too buddy, me too. But some things are more important, don't you think? It would be a much much better world if the wealthy and powerful had to think carefully before acting. Think carefully before that action of misconduct. Bear the responsibility for their actions. Be afraid of the consequences.
And on the flip-side, if it's an exec at another company getting tarred and feathered by the media for their incompetence, it means they probably won't end up at my company in six months' time and do the same thing.
> Steal 20$ out of a cash register and make the local news. Waste a billion dollars at a corp and make insane decisions and ride out on a golden parachute.
Getting pushed out of a position is very career damaging at the executive level. Those golden parachutes are pretty rare, too. Most of the executives I know from companies you haven't heard of (and some that you maybe have) who were pushed out took a huge hit to their careers after that. The best play is to start calling up executive recruiters and try to get any job as soon as possible once the writing is on the wall that you're being fired.
And come on, stealing $20 doesn't register these days.
> And come on, stealing $20 doesn't register these days
and come on, you know exactly what is meant here. An individual steals something, they get punished. Executives of the largest banks create a scheme that ultimately crashes the world economy and nobody goes to jail. Quibbling on the example's use of $20 is just strange
See his other comments in HN in the previous wp “incident”, simply said he _is_ nut
Those phrases often imply that they were fired or asked to resign - although the deniability can be useful, which is why they’re so often used. As a recent example, Fidji Simo went on leave from her role at OpenAI several months before leaving. Although I don’t know for sure, I would suppose that she was essentially fired when she went on leave, and the subsequent success of Codex after she went on leave confirmed the decision to fire her. It’s possible that, if Codex hadn’t been a success, she might have been brought back, so putting her on leave was useful for optionality.
People go on leave regularly for health reasons, and Fidji Simo has been quite open about her health. Unless you have evidence of your claim, the official explanation is simplest. That's especially the case here since firing someone on health leave can expose you to lawsuits under labor law in the US and many other countries.
Fidji Simo has well documented chronic health issues so there’s no reason to assume that the ostensible and actual reasoning are far apart there.
But the fact that she went on leave just as it became clear that Anthropic looked to be hitting escape velocity is suspicious, although not dispositive. When she was hired, her health issues also stopped her from coming into the office, but she still worked from home.
Firing a CEO makes your company look bad. Even if you are firing them, you don't say you're firing them.
Like sama? (Hope I don't get dang'ed for being political, especially against a ycombi founder...)
He is surely very evidently mentally ill.
This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for decades, as well as writing a big chunk of what was "early modern" WP. Before he came unglued.
The fact that he looked, sounded, talked the way he did, was involved, put his own money where his mouth is, and was press-available to the extent he was is a lot of why WordPress was ever taken seriously. Given the level of control he has, it was used pretty judiciously for the longest time.
I am of the opinion that his broad charge against WP Engine was valid; I think he handled it insanely.
But as I say, he has come unglued. I'd be surprised if he returns to the job. I wish him well as I think anyone who has made money because of WP should. Things have gone wrong but there was a long run of things going remarkably well.
I do think this was overdue, for everyone including Matt, even though he evidently cannot see it. I hope, but am not hopeful as it were, that he sees that this is a message from the world to change track. I would instead expect to see a bit of revenge.
> He is surely very evidently mentally ill.
I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful.
I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner. I suspect that many people, myself included, would struggle in similar situations.
Occasionally a person can find themselves in a place where quitting is the best option for everyone involved, but the person at the centre is so dug in that they don’t even consider the possibility.
> I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful.
There are, to me, abundant signs that he is severely burned out, dysregulated and irrational.
(In this statement, in other statements, in his actions that wilfully worsened his own case against WP Engine, in his blog posts etc.)
These are mental health issues. I have experienced many of them myself (I am indeed recovering from them now) and do not know what else you could possibly call them.
He is very evidently experiencing continuing poor mental health. I don't know why the board would say "leave of absence" if they were not themselves alluding to his health. He clearly needs a break from the thing he does for his own benefit.
I absolutely wish him well and hope he steps back and takes care of himself for a while; none of this is worth worse health.
I'm no expert, but I suspect that a pattern of lashing out against opponents during in a high stakes business dispute would not typically be considered clinically significant on its own. I don't know how you or others in this thread are intending to use terms like "mental illness" or "mental health issues," but generally I don't think they're appropriate unless you're talking about problems where there's evidence of an underlying dysfunction and no other obvious immediate cause (like exhaustion). Of course, some may argue it's not appropriate to diagnose public figures either way.
You are forgetting that he is a rich and famous person. Those people can't be mentally ill, they can be eccentric, bizarre, funky or outlandish. But never actually mentally ill, that word is reserved for the plebeians like us.
It just sounds like the behaviours of an unprofessional douchebag to me, not mental illness
But when the same person was extremely professional, kind and helpful, six months before a sudden shift in behaviour?
That is mental illness. It doesn't imply that a virus took hold of your brain cells. It can be inability to cope with the real world. I suspect most of us will go through it at some point in our lives.
> He is surely very evidently mentally ill.
I agree and upvoted your post. But can I just say that it is super-reddit to diagnose someone based on your B- undergrad psych classes.
We should go back to the classics like "he went off his rocker!", or "he's totally unhinged!" or "completely delulu!"
(of course the people who know, know, and they shouldn't tell you.)
I am saying this as someone who has had repeated and ongoing issues with WP Engine as a hosting platform: no, Matt Mullenweg was not even valid in his basic assumptions motivating his lawsuit against WP Engine. The idea that a hosting platform is leeching off the WordPress ecosystem is absurd, for two reasons:
1. WordPress is free and open source software, developed under reciprocal licensing (GPL). Hosting companies are neither legally nor morally obligated to contribute back to WordPress core. They are already a beneficial part of the ecosystem.
2. WP Engine was contributing back to the WordPress ecosystem, just not Matt Mullenweg's corner of it.
WordPress is a modular platform and plugin and theme developers are just as important to WordPress's continued success as core development is. WP Engine happens to own Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is basically WordPress's answer to the Drupal Fields API[0]. ACF is what lets you add arbitrary fields to WordPress's page edit screen without having to write a bunch of custom metabox hooks and forms. It was a huge timesaver before things moved to page builders[1] and it's still useful even if you're using a page builder.
[0] Formerly Content Construction Kit
[1] Full disclosure: I hate Gutenberg. It is not WordPress, it's a React development kit tumor shoved inside WordPress. Any other page builder would be preferable.
Finally a sane comment. If you actually watched the interview with Theo, he openly admits to just randomly throwing in a demand of arbitrary percentage of their sales. The whole episode is actually insane.
There's no need to diagnose Mullenweg when his behavior could easily be explained by being a run-of-the-mill arrogant asshole.
He never seems to have broken from reality or suffered a mental breakdown. He seems to just treat people (including his employees, customers, and competitors) like garbage who are beneath him.
I think his recent screwing over of that custom fields plugin team and cutting off access to the plugins repo for WPengine was really a dumb move that has lead him to where he is now.
You very rarely fire execs these days, the main reason being you don't want them to sue the company over their loss of reputation.
You want to keep-up appearances and leave some plausible deniability, even if it's generally BS.
Who knows, maybe he can try and blackmail them too[0] to get his way. It's worked out great so far.
[0] https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt#102-wp-engine-fi...
I'm surprised that founders still care about all that stuff. They already made tons of money, who cares. None of it means anything. Nothing is fair in this society.
They don't mind the system working unfairly in their favor; they only have an issue with it when it starts working against them. At that point, it's too late; you have no voice.
> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.”
This line is so perfectly on the nose it could be in a McSweeney's article and yet here it is in reality. We are truly on the weirdest timeline.
Many Burning Man guides, including the original arctic monkey guide that I first read about 20 years ago, specifically warn against making any life altering decisions for weeks after Burning Man.
Decompression is a bitch when coming down from half a dozen psychedelics.
Given the long lines and the mud this year my "idea" would be to skip future festivals.
Unfortunately, this is for the best. WordPress powers a large percentage of the internet, and I'm not sure what's going on with Matt (who I've always liked) but something turned the past few years.
He's been behind unforced error after unforced error as CEO, and I hope a break helps him gain some perspective (although I don't see him being brought back).
WordPress has been his life for 23 years. Doing the same thing for 23 years likely makes it difficult to have a proper perspective.
"Unfortunately" for whom? I'm pretty ok, even happy, with him out.
The unfortunate part is that he became someone you’re happy to see out. I think he’s absolutely become a net negative for Wordpress, but that wasn’t always the case.
it just sucks to see someone who helped popularize something so many people care about change (at least publicly) for the worse.
Unfortunate this was the result of 23 years, not unfortunate it's happening.
No reason given?
Any reason needed?!? We can all see what he’s done!
I agree, but there's still a big "Why now?" question in my head. I suspect the board knows of something even more spectacularly stupid he's about to do.
There is a hearing on Sep 30 as part of the WPE vs Automattic/WP trial where they will decide of Matt allegedly destroyed evidence. Matt apparently had automatic deleting messages enabled on his platforms, even throughout the period where they were supposed to be preserving it. His side said it was due to his "romantic partners", but his lawyers argued during the whole time everything had been preserved when it appears it wasn't. So the result of that hearing may came with a pretty big bill attached to it for all the legal time that was wasted for the other side, as well as instructions for the jury etc to assume the evidence was all harmful. So the timing might be related to that.
He got tired of WPEngine not contributing back to wordpress, so he made it his mission to try and get them to pitch in.
He tried to extort them. Hosting providers have been selling Wordpress hosting for years without "giving back"
Does Wordpress "give back" to PHP and Linux?
Automattic are the biggest sponsors of the PHP foundation so they do give back there.
I think they gave like $100k as a donation, which is great. But they were demanding WPE I think for around 32 million a year or something nuts. You could argue PHP is way more important to WordPress than WPE is.
That's why, at a conference fully paid for by WPEngine, he announced that WPEngine had never paid for anything.
He had a perfectly good example of how to do that productively. His friend Dries Buytaert over in Drupal land has had a commit credit system going for years that has worked well enough that people are constantly trying to game it. Instead he went for the jugular. I really don’t think he’s okay.
WordPress is free software. Its users are under no obligation to contribute to its development, or to give money to Automattic.
Does WPEngine have any obligation to contribute back? How is WordPress licensed?
Only to the extent the company pledged to do so.
It did pledge, and the follow-up on that pledge was minimal.
Didn't he start that campaign at a conference for WordPress developers funded by WP engine? I don't have any insight into what they did or didn't contribute, but it seems their obligation was zero and their level was quite a bit higher than that.
"Unfortunately"??
"Unfortunately", because Matt did a lot of good for the internet over the past two decades. WordCamp is (or was) really amazing, the community he built is really great, the Automattic Lounge was cool, he's donated millions of dollars to good causes, and WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet.
Automattic also bought Tumblr and Pocket Casts, publishing the code of the latter. I used to have a subscription just to support them.
The purchase of Tumblr was basically Elon purchasing Twitter without the political gain. I'm amazed the purchase decision was ever made, and more amazed that it still exists after the hit to the user base.
And Simplenote.
Huh. I still remember back in the Gutenberg launch era and all the drama around it (2018) the internet saying he was the devil for profiting from WP.
He read the commit logs and understood much of what he read. That's deep understanding of the product. That alone puts him in the top few percent of CEOs.
IMO.
Wordpress enshittified in the mid-2010s. It wasn’t recent. So, I only agree off we resolve “past few years” to at least a decade.
em-dash by Cloudflare looks interesting in terms of replacing Wordpress.
by garnering enough of an ecosystem to cause a migration will be the bigger challenge.
of course some people will say in the age of agents will people need to visit websites ;)
Am I looking at the right thing?
https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash
> EmDash depends on Dynamic Workers to run secure sandboxed plugins. Dynamic Workers are currently only available on paid accounts. Upgrade your account (starting at $5/mo) or comment out the worker_loaders block of your wrangler.jsonc configuration file to disable plugins.
Seems like a pretty poor replacement for WordPress, which will run on pretty much whatever random system happens to be within eyesight.
It can be deployed to a node.js server with sqlite https://docs.emdashcms.com/deployment/nodejs/
Not as simple as wp, but not tied to one hosting provider.
A CMS that can only run on one hosting provider?
It can be deployed to a node.js server with sqlite https://docs.emdashcms.com/deployment/nodejs/
Not as simple as wp, but not tied to one hosting provider.
> Doing the same thing for 23 years likely makes it difficult to have a proper perspective.
Preach.
Seems to twist perception that reality is a fractal when it's recursive and eventually exits (everything dies).
Explains religion, politics, and similar longtermism memes.
I think it is easy to underestimate how big of a deal this is. Matt has a stranglehold on Automattic and Wordpress, it is not possible to remove his control over the ecosystem and he is volatile. Ousting him as CEO is almost certain to cause a major reaction from Matt, so, for Automattic to make this decision is a very big deal. The right decision for the long term but the hard decision. I expect we will see Matt try to punish Automattic’s board, it will get worse for Automattic before it gets better.
Here is Matt talking about his control: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150
If he has 84% voting share, can't he just fire the board?
Firing the board is the least Matt-like option. He has absolute control and ownership over the WordPress project, I think it is more likely that he starts his own Automattic splinter company and removes Automattic from the WordPress project. I’d guess he is already filing incorporation docs for Antimatter Inc. or some other Matt themed name.
In most venture-backed companies no, because board seats are one of the things you give major investors in exchange for their money.
In this case? Possibly! Ann Dunwoody and Sue Decker look like independents, and he might be able to unilaterally replace either or both of them.
If he's lost the confidence of the board and does that, how much is his company worth?
Does it matter? He owns it and doesn't plan to flip it, and they have enough income to go on for a long time.
If Mullenweg attempts to fire the board that just suspended him, he would be weaponizing proxy votes against the very investors who originally granted them. While founder proxies are often structured to be irrevocable, using them to purge the board would almost certainly trigger a massive legal battle, attempts by investors to breach or revoke the proxy agreements, and severe financial instability for the company.
While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board, executing that move would ignite a corporate civil war rather than a clean transition of power.
> While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board
This is very unlikely. True Ventures almost certainly controls at least one seat. (Until Phil Black left last year they actually held two seats, but that doesn't mean they had the right to. Either way, at the moment it's just Toni Schneider.)
I'd definitely take away his access having seen how vindictive he has been throughout the WPE saga, for everyone's sake
Long overdue. Matt needs to get some professional help or support, some of his actions have been incredibly harmful to the WordPress community.
Here is the whole saga until May 2025: https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
That lead me to a number of good sources, especially this:
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/24/automattic-vs-wp-engine/
which links to a lot more
I already knew Matt was throwing a tantrum and refusing to address conflicts of interest. However WP Engine also do not come out of it looking good. Nor do a lot of people in the WP community. Matt is a problem, but it does not look like he is the only problem.
Hey, that's me! Unfortunately that's only reasonably complete through mid-February of 2025; i had some health issues and was never able to catch back up.
I briefly worked in the web agency SaaS space and hoooo boy, I have never known a more gossipy or dramatic industry.
That’s not to pass comment either way on Mullenweg
It’s just WordPress folk are nuts.
They should have voted on if pineapple deserves to be on pizza while they were at it. The guy had to go.
I’m a bit relieved. Only knowing it superficially through its larger public actions, Automattic used to be one of the “good guys” companies to me. I envisioned myself applying there at some point. This has obviously changed over the last 1-2 years.
I don’t doubt that the good parts were largely Matt’s work, but well ... I think a lot of us followed his semi-recent public actions.
I’m a bit surprised they didn’t pull the plug earlier given they could have. Hasn’t he already caused vast damage?
Still, he has done a lot of good for the internet and world at large. I don’t want to discount that. I just hope he manages to chill a bit.
Enforced by checkboxes on every login form, no doubt. Less sarcastically: I hope his corporate access is thoroughly controlled; we've seen him in 'full force', before.
Article says no change for .org... this will almost surely become interesting.
Quick, somebody back up the WP Plugins repository.
I'm shocked. I always thought that Matt held the majority of the voting shares, and that the board of directors was mostly there as a rubber stamp.
Voting shares and board of directors are two different mechanisms. Just because he holds 80%+ of voting shares, doesn't mean he can control who runs the company. Shareholders can make up (elect/remove) directors on the board, the board decides who can run the company (or other officials). His vote against was likely true, but if the board is 4 seats and he only has one vote, that's 25%.
A lot of this is pretty typical, but what's interesting is what happens next. He could just remove members of the board with his 80%+ control, and build a board that backs him. I assume they have investor agreements that prevent that.
Regardless of who he puts on the board, directors have legal obligations to the SEC and all shareholders. If he wants that level of control he would need to take the company private, and various investor agreements probably prevent this.
> If he wants that level of control he would need to take the company private, and various investor agreements probably prevent this.
Since when was Automatic a public listed company?
It is not. They did take VC funding however, which is when the board and the investor agreements came into force.
I am surprised it has taken the Automattic board so long, just don't understand that.
I am so curious why now, what changed? The WPEngine saga was started two years ago.
from my own observations:
a) you don't want the WPEngine case going to trial and that is coming to a decision point soon. chances are the new CEO and board settle.
b) wordpress is being absolutely obliterated by ai. work for commercial plugin authors and agencies has dried up while the platform and ecosystem see major security issues and worms exploit a large number of sites every week.
wordpress and automattic haven't responded to this well, at all. at times it is often straight denial.
founder CEO distracted by expensive lawsuit while facing existential threat to project that will require complete attention and a lot of skill to steer out of
How is the WPEngine case going anyways?
Glancing at the docket [1] in an attempt to answer this myself... looks like the trial is scheduled for a bit over a year from now [2].. A ton of fighting over discovery... a motion asking for fairly monster sanctions for spoilation of evidence [3] (to be argued on the 30th). Claiming in [3] with what appear to be pretty solid receipts (as far as we can see through the redactions anyways) that Matt was willfully destroying communications related to the case and subject to the discovery - and Automattic's lawyers lied to the court that they preserved them (naturally Automattic's lawyers have a reply with an entirely different interpretation of events if you go look for it... but at least at a glance WPEngine seems more convincing).
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/wpengine-inc-v...
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
[3] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
Just side note that AI is not destroying one of the largest e-commerce platform, Woocommerce on top of Wordpress.
Unless there's a full on scandal or emergency, boards don't force CEOs out quickly. This would have been building for years with multiple rounds of trying to de-escalate and get the situation under control.
Probably back room deal between Wordpress board/management and WPEngine board/management. It's a safe bet that WPEngine was destroying Wordpress legally simply because their CEO doesn't suffer from verbal diarrhea and actually shuts up when the lawyers tell him to.
If you get Matt out of the way, you can ink a deal and resolve everything so that even if Matt pulls something else, there are contracts in place that can't be gotten rid of so easily.
It's impressive this took so long.
I had the opposite thought: I'm impressed the board did anything at all, given how useless they are at most companies.
pro tip: don’t go public. don’t get a board. maintain full control.
Bypass paywall at either https://web.archive.org/web/20260909213058/https://www.404me... or https://archive.ph/7J5TB.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/993022/wordpress-automattic-ce... also has a writeup which takes some quotes from the article (and a statement by Automattic).
Finally
Reminds me of the first season of Succession
This is fantastic news. Matt is an ass and unfit to lead a small HOA, let alone a company and open source project.
> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.” This year’s festival ended on September 7.
HN needs to allow some html in comments so we can put ‘lmao’ in <blink> and <marquee> tags
Finally.
This is likely how they pull out of the disasterous legal actions Mullenweg has taken.
Finally.
I guess when people vote the same way, it’s technically a conspiracy?
No, a conspiracy would require that they all got together in secret to plan to vote that way. Which is hardly necessary in a case like this.
>Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.”
What is wrong with these people?
I was curious what this meant, so I looked into it.
They asked Automatic.css to change their name: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1omrtrk/automatt...
Automatic.css is a paid CSS framework specifically for WordPress.
Legally speaking I have no opinion here, but I don't think it's as out-of-pocket as it sounds.
The article linked ( https://www.404media.co/automattic-automatic-trademark-matt-... ) is behind a paywall. But reading https://www.searchenginejournal.com/automattic-disputes-use-... it sounds like the claim 'Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic"' might not be accurate.
Yeah, regardless of other aspects of Automattic's behaviour, flagging that an identically-pronounced single letter variation of their registered company name might be a confusingly similar brand for a third party commercial service specifically designed to customise Automattic's product to adopt seems to be at the reasonable end of trademark disputes...
404 Media usually has fairly shoddy journalism. Take everything they say with a grain of salt.
FUD. Don’t spread nonsense. They’re as rigorous as any other tech journo, you just have an axe to grind.
I don't see how this is FUD. Both a sibling comment and my parent pointed out that there's more to the story than simply "claiming the word automatic." They provided extra context (which the article didn't).
I am merely relating my experience that stuff like this is common with 404 Media. They'll omit nuances - whether intentionally or just being shoddy.
"Windows", "Word" and "Excel" are just plain English words, but it appears you can trademark them for specific industry. Maybe you have to make it more specific. Like "Microsoft Windows"?
Good, get him the fuck away from Wordpress. Though frankly, a better solution might be for businesses to ask themselves whether or not they need Wordpress anymore.
In the mean time, if you're unable to derisk Mullenweg out of your business stack, this is a good first step.
WordPress dominance of the web has certainly peaked, but history indicates there will be several years in which to continue to extract comfortable profits while riding it down. e.g. Oracle, a database that almost no business has actually needed in decades.
I'm not convinced that sort of legacy lock in exists in the web space. It moves fast and its value is in the content. In the age of AI, migrating that data makes it trivial to move away from a risky platform. I cut my development teeth on WP and managed some fairly large sites. There are far more interesting and well developed alternatives out there.
Sure, but, even with AI and the technical competence to steer it, it's still a pretty big lift to switch from, e.g. WordPress with billing and various other stuff to some ad hoc other thing. Even when I decided I was done with managing content in WordPress and moved it out to a Hugo static site for my company website, I still kept the commerce stuff in WordPress just because it works and we know it works from a decade or so of operation.
I'm certainly not deploying new WordPress sites, partly because of how weird and hostile Mullenweg has made the WordPress ecosystem for no good reason. I don't even necessarily disagree with the sentiments behind his words and actions, but the methods and how far it's gone in terms of lawfare is just silly and destructive.
Anyway, they won't get decades like Oracle has gotten. But, they've got a few years of comfy margins ahead if they don't blow it up too badly.
They'll continue to have plenty of existing passive revenue as long as WooCommerce users continue to use Stripe, and large enterprises continue to buy in to WP.com VIP.
This rings true to me. I am looking at setting up my own online store, and if you sell (legal!) stuff which Shopify Payments disallows, but Stripe does allow, you end up looking at WooCommerce (a very popular WordPress plugin) pretty fast.
The uptick in Webflow usage alone would suggest the damage has already been done.
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The best line was buried at the bottom. Did Automattic really attempt to claim it owns the word “automatic?
This is better explained elsewhere in this thread, but it boils down to a totally valid trademark dispute over a company calling itself Automatic.css which supplies services for WordPress installs.
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If the board is going behind his back... then how does he know he was put on leave?
Anyone could have forked WordPress at any time or spun up their own multi tenant instances if they were truly concerned, this just seems personal. It’s a bad day for founders IMO.
it's personal only in the sense that Matt had been doing an absolutely awful job leading the company for several years, and the board had fiduciary obligations to intervene
this is not a bad day for founders; it's Matt having gotten to the end point of his value as a leader
Don't get me wrong: getting to a point where you have 2,000 employees and a 7 billion dollar valuation is a massive accomplishment. He was clearly very effective at various parts of the company's history. But it scaled beyond the point where his skillset and personality could continue to credibly steer the ship
The entire saga started due to WP Engine "forking" WordPress.
So problem solved? My only criticism is that 1) Mr. Mullenweg should have held tighter controls over the IP and 2) the direction to the community that they are encouraged to use "WP" as a prefix for their business names and products was ultimately a bad one leading to this mess..
Matt, you shouldn't have picked a FLOSS license if you didn't intend for the software to be FLOSS in the first place.
WP Engine's "forking" consisted of disabling the revisions feature by default.
As someone who's personally been bitten by this particular WP Engine misfeature, describing this as a "fork" is disingenuous at best. The average Linux distro ships way more out-of-tree changes than WP Engine ever did.
> Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.”
Real austin powers vibes
> He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark.
It's a little less dramatic than that. They did send a demand letter to automatic.css saying that since 'automatic' and 'automattic' differ by only one letter, are pronounced the same, and are marketed to similar groups the name is likely to cause confusion, hence automatic.css should change its name.
Which is not the same thing as claiming the word automatic generally.
Personally it sounds like a loser if they took it to court since (a) automatic is a common word and (b) they already asked automatic.css to add a "not affiliated with word press" disclaimer (which automatic.css did add). IANAL.