Yet another Hacker News

Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster

29 points ilamont 4 hours ago 67 comments

Grombobulous 12 hours ago | parent

That’s a weird thing to say about “coup attempts.”

Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.

In the world of AI I imagine that Automattic’s core business model is in turmoil.

sva_ 12 hours ago | parent

> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.

Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy? I think we've seen over an over again which one works and which one doesn't.

jmull 12 hours ago | parent

Is that a settled question? China isn't exactly struggling right now.

thaumasiotes 11 hours ago | parent

> China isn't exactly struggling right now.

Have you asked people in China about this?

sva_ 11 hours ago | parent

If you look on Alibaba or AliExpress and see different companies competing and undercutting each others prices, I don't really see it as a planned economy.

dghlsakjg 11 hours ago | parent

I think a better term might be a “steered economy”. You see fierce competition in some very specific and preordained market areas. Lithium batteries, solar panels, electric cars, industrial and autonomous robots, AI.

Now go look at the 5 year plan from Beijing. Green technology, robotics, mature node chips, and AI are the focuses.

In other words, it isn’t a mistake that China dominates in the industries that it does.

throwup238 11 hours ago | parent

The CCP publishes their primary central planning mechanism for all to see. They just adopted the new 15th Five Year Plan in March [1].

There’s a whole bureaucracy just to coordinate the implementation at the sector, provincial, and corporate level driven by the State Council, NDRC, and NPC. Governments at all levels are involved with coming up with their own implementation plans to execute on the Five Year Plan.

You can trace decades of Chinese industrial development to those plans but the Chinese system is very different from the Soviet central planning mechanism, which is why I think you’re misinterpreting Alibaba’s price competition. The CCP explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like Alibaba and the manufacturers on it to compete; that’s their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the five year plan instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but it’s very much there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Five-Year_Plan

edgyquant 11 hours ago | parent

China has succeeded so much by moving away from a planned economy when they were fully planned they were one of the poorest nations in the world. Most successful nations are mixed economies and yes, this is a settled question.

miyoji 11 hours ago | parent

Past performance is no indication of future success. It doesn't matter what's been successful in the past, these things can change. Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed and so did the narrative.

None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.

Kuxe 11 hours ago | parent

> Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was) According to whom?

fwip 11 hours ago | parent

They were very poor before central planning, and the central planning is what got them from being very poor to relatively poor and economically powerful.

edgyquant 4 hours ago | parent

This is objectively not the case, selling goods to America and Europe is what made China rich and that is due to a free market system they implemented

marcus_holmes 13 minutes ago | parent

Only very partially free, though. The govt still has massive control over the markets, and especially the banks. They still plan a lot of their economy.

shigawire 12 hours ago | parent

Democracy in business would be worker co-ops or employee ownership schemes. It would still be fully market-based, not planned.

miyoji 11 hours ago | parent

> Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy?

Not at all. Market vs planned economy is about how the economy is set up. Are there businesses that offer products that you can choose between? That's a market economy. You can have that with democratic governance of corporations. The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy.

You don't need ownership by idiot dictators with money to have a market.

freedomben 12 hours ago | parent

> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.

Ianal but I don't think the laws care about governing structure of corps. You can start a new corp and run it democratically all you want. There are co-ops and other interesting structures out there

marcus_holmes 16 minutes ago | parent

Afaik corps can only have board voting on the basis of share ownership ("one share one vote"), but you can mess around with how many votes each share class gets.

Co-ops can have more democratic voting arrangements, and usually have "one shareholder one vote" principles, though other options are available, and you can mess around with how many votes each shareholder gets.

Arnt 12 hours ago | parent

Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.

kmeisthax 11 hours ago | parent

It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy. It's very explicitly plutocracy (rule by money) as the operating principle of voting power is one share, one vote.

Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy.

If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.

Arnt 10 hours ago | parent

It's one share, one vote. And you have a choice: You can ask the company to pay you (ie. apply for a job there), or you can pay for a share in the company. Either way, the decisions are made by those who pay. And that can include you — anyone and everyone has the right to start a company and to employ others, anyone and everyone has the right to ask for shares in the company as part of negotiating compensation.

I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.

Timon3 7 hours ago | parent

> It's one share, one vote.

This is just wrong. As kmeisthax mentioned, shares can have different voting weights - if any at all. Many shareholders have no voting power.

> I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.

Did you actually employ them, or did you buy a specific service?

Arnt 6 hours ago | parent

Indeed, shares can have different voting weights. And that matters, if you care mostly about the corner cases.

Timon3 2 hours ago | parent

Well, it matters a whole lot once you choose to bring up "One share, one vote" in response to "One person, one vote", since it shows that it's either wrong or shows a gross misunderstanding of democracy.

tirpen 11 hours ago | parent

> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.

Congratulations you have reinvented communism from first principles! And you are completely correct in your analysis.

noir_lord 11 hours ago | parent

Regulation of corporations and the internal/external harms they do isn't communism.

That's a hilarious leap.

flossly 11 hours ago | parent

Actually you reply to a comment that makes a lot of sense.

Look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

And in Russian I believe such a company is called a "Soviet". They idea that the main part of the economy is run by this kind of organizations is one of the best parts of the USSR's attempt at communism.

noir_lord 11 hours ago | parent

Except A) he said none of that B) it's not actually relevant to what he did say.

There is a vast range of ways you can regulate a corporation and only some of them qualify as communism.

Germany has worker councils, it's still not communist.

Several European countries have much stricter regulations on how companies behave that moves them from the absolute power fiefdom internal model, guess what, still not communism.

jasonvorhe 11 hours ago | parent

Who do you think pays for the political election campaign theater of all theses "democratic candidates" though?

I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.

flossly 11 hours ago | parent

It's allowed to do a more democratic business in most countries, it's called a:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

There have been some govts that mandated this type of organization for part of their economy; we usually refer to that as communism.

(no value judgement here, there are day's when I'm quite a commie myself)

cebert 12 hours ago | parent

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

delichon 12 hours ago | parent

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

larodi 11 hours ago | parent

an esoteric club perhaps, given half of these folks are imaginary?

righthand 25 minutes ago | parent

Modern socializing is all about appreciating non-existent achievements by non-existent people so that everyone knows you’re cool. Or as best stated: “Life will find a way.” - Dr. Real Human Jurassic Park Character, And Not Michael Crichton

pluc 12 hours ago | parent

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

zero_shift 11 hours ago | parent

I only recently realised why the org is called AutoMATTic

rpozarickij 11 hours ago | parent

A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).

Hamuko 11 hours ago | parent

Did you know that Adidas was founded by Adolf "Adi" Dassler?

robshep 11 hours ago | parent

And Puma by his brother Rudi, in the same town. Great Feud story.

dofm 9 hours ago | parent

Rudidas would definitely be a worse name. Though I'd be surprised if an Amazon Marketplace knockoff brand is not already using it.

Hamuko 8 hours ago | parent

It was briefly "Ruda" before it morphed into "Puma".

dofm 7 hours ago | parent

I did not know that. Very good decision!

mercer 6 hours ago | parent

Adolfler would've been even worse.

pluc 8 hours ago | parent

all day i diss another sibling

pan69 5 hours ago | parent

Similar thing with Aldi. Both brothers kept the name, sort of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi#Split

scarecrowbob 10 hours ago | parent

It took me quite a while to "get" the "Arby's" restaurant name.

NSUserDefaults 11 hours ago | parent

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

generj 11 hours ago | parent

What a feckless board.

largbae 11 hours ago | parent

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

dlcarrier 2 hours ago | parent

Definitely stay away from anything Matt Mullenweg is involved in. Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.

imthatsteve 11 hours ago | parent

I really hate how heavily these comments get moderated. In my opinion if a site moderates user comments this heavily then the site should lose section 230 protections and be considered a publisher and be held responsible for any comments that you choose not to moderate. If the site functions as an editor but it tries to present that editorialized section as user opinions then the entire site may as well be astroturffed, your better off going to wikipedia to see what "regular people" think

dlcarrier 2 hours ago | parent

The purpose of the Communications Decency Act is to allow providers to moderate community content, and section 230 provides liability from both undermoderating and overmoderating, so that providers don't forgo mederating altogether, for liability reasons.

If section 230 only protected from undermoderating and not from overmoderating, then providers would be incentivized to keep every comment up, from scam links to hate speech, because they'd only get in trouble for removing comments and not for allowing them.

marcus_holmes 21 minutes ago | parent

Isn't most of the moderation from downvotes rather than mods?

3stacks 14 minutes ago | parent

I don't even have a downvote button. Is it "flag"?

hellon3wheels 10 minutes ago | parent

You get a downvote button, separate from "flag", once you reach a certain karma level (I forget the number, though)

BLKNSLVR 7 minutes ago | parent

I think you need to be at a certain level of karma to 'earn' the right to downvote.

Flag is for inappropriate content / behaviour.

davidmurphy 4 hours ago | parent

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

dlcarrier 2 hours ago | parent

He can vote in a replacement board. The board knew that any action they took was temporary, and likely planned around this from the start.

dang 38 minutes ago | parent

Recent and related:

Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 - Sept 2026 (144 comments)

Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283 - Sept 2026 (372 comments)

(I know there have been many other threads in this long saga but I don't have the time (or the stomach) to try to list them)

p.s. We merged an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683265) into this one, which is why the timestamps of some of the comments are older.

f33d5173 30 minutes ago | parent

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