Yet another Hacker News

Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

46 points LeoPanthera 2 hours ago 108 comments

Shank 4 hours ago | parent

> “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.

SaltyBackendGuy 4 hours ago | parent

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.

datakan 4 hours ago | parent

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.

actionfromafar 3 hours ago | parent

Ah, but they take the big risks, you see. Someone has to do it.

gottorf 3 hours ago | parent

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.

skissane 2 hours ago | parent

> 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.

ThrowawayR2 1 hour ago | parent

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.

mcmcmc 51 minutes ago | parent

Satisfaction? It’s about truth and justice, investors deserve to know about executive malfeasance

patternMachine 4 hours ago | parent

Barring truly bad behavior this is how executives get fired.

tibbydudeza 4 hours ago | parent

Spend more time with my family :).

telotortium 3 hours ago | parent

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.

adw 2 hours ago | parent

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.

telotortium 1 hour ago | parent

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.

_fw 4 hours ago | parent

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.

ramon156 4 hours ago | parent

Reminds me of the first season of Succession

hermitcrab 4 hours ago | parent

>Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.”

What is wrong with these people?

wmf 4 hours ago | parent

That's how you can tell the article isn't giving you the full picture.

gkoberger 4 hours ago | parent

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.

hermitcrab 4 hours ago | parent

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.

notahacker 2 hours ago | parent

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...

BeetleB 3 hours ago | parent

404 Media usually has fairly shoddy journalism. Take everything they say with a grain of salt.

baublet 3 hours ago | parent

FUD. Don’t spread nonsense. They’re as rigorous as any other tech journo, you just have an axe to grind.

BeetleB 3 hours ago | parent

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.

bewuethr 2 hours ago | parent

The article links to an entire separate article about automatic.css.

Crontab 1 hour ago | parent

Hard disagree. 404 has been awesome since being founded.

bellowsgulch 4 hours ago | parent

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.

SwellJoe 3 hours ago | parent

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.

kmeisthax 3 hours ago | parent

The uptick in Webflow usage alone would suggest the damage has already been done.

gkoberger 4 hours ago | parent

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.

biglyburrito 4 hours ago | parent

"Unfortunately"??

gkoberger 4 hours ago | parent

"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.

solarkraft 4 hours ago | parent

Automattic also bought Tumblr and Pocket Casts, publishing the code of the latter. I used to have a subscription just to support them.

dofm 4 hours ago | parent

And Simplenote.

technion 3 hours ago | parent

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.

Gualdrapo 4 hours ago | parent

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.

antonvs 3 hours ago | parent

> WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet.

Unfortunately.

solarkraft 4 hours ago | parent

He still contributed a lot to the world during the good times.

Arnt 4 hours ago | parent

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.

gpm 4 hours ago | parent

Yeah, it's unfortunate when anyone goes off the deep end.

pbreit 4 hours ago | parent

No reason given?

chris_wot 3 hours ago | parent

Any reason needed?!? We can all see what he’s done!

bigiain 3 hours ago | parent

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.

downrightmike 3 hours ago | parent

He got tired of WPEngine not contributing back to wordpress, so he made it his mission to try and get them to pitch in.

nijave 44 minutes ago | parent

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?

wpm 12 minutes ago | parent

Does WPEngine have any obligation to contribute back? How is WordPress licensed?

michael0church 4 hours ago | parent

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.

nosioptar 3 hours ago | parent

Classicpress may be worth checking out.

https://www.classicpress.net/

stephenlf 4 hours ago | parent

The entire internet is breathing a sigh of relief

00ze 3 hours ago | parent

> 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.

dzonga 3 hours ago | parent

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 ;)

Volundr 3 hours ago | parent

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.

rpgbr 1 hour ago | parent

"Unfortunately" for whom? I'm pretty ok, even happy, with him out.

dcrazy 4 hours ago | parent

I guess when people vote the same way, it’s technically a conspiracy?

biglyburrito 4 hours ago | parent

No, it's called "voting".

dcrazy 2 hours ago | parent

That was my point. My sarcasm mustn’t have come through.

antonvs 3 hours ago | parent

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.

garbagepatch 4 hours ago | parent

Here is the whole saga until May 2025: https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...

pluc 4 hours ago | parent

https://mullenweg.wtf/ picked up after that

adrienne 1 hour ago | parent

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.

classictraffic 56 minutes ago | parent

Hope you’re doing better these days!

solarkraft 4 hours ago | parent

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.

ValentineC 4 hours ago | parent

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.

ojame 3 hours ago | parent

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.

angry_octet 3 hours ago | parent

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.

Onavo 2 hours ago | parent

> 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?

angry_octet 20 minutes ago | parent

I should have said: establish sole ownership.

ChoosesBarbecue 4 hours ago | parent

I am so curious why now, what changed? The WPEngine saga was started two years ago.

minimaxir 4 hours ago | parent

It never ended.

ChoosesBarbecue 4 hours ago | parent

Touché, reworded it to be clearer on what I meant :).

nikcub 3 hours ago | parent

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

gpm 1 hour ago | parent

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...

bsder 1 hour ago | parent

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.

reticulates 4 hours ago | parent

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

pluc 4 hours ago | parent

I'd definitely take away his access having seen how vindictive he has been throughout the WPE saga, for everyone's sake

Spinfusor 3 hours ago | parent

If he has 84% voting share, can't he just fire the board?

chris_wot 3 hours ago | parent

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.

reticulates 3 hours ago | parent

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.

ljm 25 minutes ago | parent

If he's lost the confidence of the board and does that, how much is his company worth?

tibbydudeza 4 hours ago | parent

Finally.

0xDEADBEEFCAFE 4 hours ago | parent

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.

minimaxir 4 hours ago | parent

The entire saga started due to WP Engine "forking" WordPress.

0xDEADBEEFCAFE 3 hours ago | parent

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..

nixosbestos 3 hours ago | parent

Matt, ... just log out and take a break.

kmeisthax 3 hours ago | parent

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.

mission_dolores 2 hours ago | parent

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

echoangle 4 hours ago | parent

> 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.

variaga 3 hours ago | parent

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.

ifahimreza 3 hours ago | parent

they own automatic.com right?

chris_wot 3 hours ago | parent

This is likely how they pull out of the disasterous legal actions Mullenweg has taken.

pier25 3 hours ago | parent

It's impressive this took so long.

bedroom_jabroni 3 hours ago | parent

Quick, somebody back up the WP Plugins repository.

CqtGLRGcukpy 3 hours ago | parent

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).

qarl 2 hours ago | parent

If the board is going behind his back... then how does he know he was put on leave?

doodlebugging 2 hours ago | parent

OT - I recognized the name but don't know much about the personality. Evidently, judging from many comments here, there is one. I was frankly struck by the depth of the corduroy on that jacket. At first glance I thought it was pinstripes but in profile it is obviously corduroy. Almost security blanket depth. It takes a different personality to don those duds.

Mil-spec cords. LOL. Downvote all you want. Just makes me think of that Crocodile Dundee dialog about the knife, except change knife to corduroy.

dramm 1 hour ago | parent

I am surprised it has taken the Automattic board so long, just don't understand that.

junon 1 hour ago | parent

Finally.

bravetraveler 1 hour ago | parent

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.

gregjw 39 minutes ago | parent

Finally

munificent 30 minutes ago | parent

> 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.