“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.

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.

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.

Here is Matt talking about his control: https://smackernews.com/item/42657150 HN

In 2022, Matt supported me and my work on WordPress Playground [1]. Playground was in its early days and most people were still questioning whether it did anything useful. I got skepticism from peers, social media, even from my direct lead at the time. Not from Matt. He encouraged me, promoted Playground, created an environment where I could build a team around it, and encouraged us to always open-source more and more for the community. Since then, Playground has matured, grown in popularity, and sparked other great open-source work [2][3][4][5]. Now it’s 2026, and Playground helps a lot of people every day.

And that wouldn’t have happened without Matt.

No company is perfect. I’m just grateful to be part of one that values open-source so, so much. Automattic has been around 21 years now. It must have spent dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars on building free, open source software! And everything have changed so much during those 21 years: The industry, the VC landscape, the prices of hardware. Every incentive to go closed-source is there, and yet Automattic is still doubling down on open-source. I think that’s pretty amazing, and I’m grateful to Matt for staying true to those values.

Anyway, that's the story. Take care of yourselves, everyone!

[1] https://wordpress.org/playground/ [2] https://wordpress.com/studio/ [3] https://github.com/WordPress/sqlite-database-integration [4] https://github.com/WordPress/php-toolkit/ [5] https://smackernews.com/item/49378305 HN

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.

That’s not to pass comment either way on Mullenweg

It’s just WordPress folk are nuts.

From a quick scan of his recent tweets, https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenwegs-messages-wen... might answer the "why now?" of this.

He didn't have particularly good arguments though, given the abject failure to create anything interesting since the original Facebook site (they've been making also-ran clones before buying the competition OR going into new markets and failing since the early 2010s). He has obviously ran the core money machine ruthlessly once he won social.

Article says no change for .org... this will almost surely become interesting.

His behaviour has shown him to be unfit to be a CEO.

He might not be perfect, but all of this was created under his leadership. That starts with a genuinely unique hiring process that lets the company find people who fit well, and it extends to the way he delegates to leaders below him so they can do their best, while still letting anyone, in any position, share their thoughts on anything. On top of that, there are all his contributions to open source, alongside the products and services under Automattic's umbrella.

I'm not sure what the intentions are behind the attacks on him, but I know from my experience that they aren't fair.

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).

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

In the mean time, if you're unable to derisk Mullenweg out of your business stack, this is a good first step.

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

What is wrong with these people?

The company statement is on TechCrunch. Mark Davies, the CFO, is interim CEO, and Mary Hubbard told TechCrunch that WordPress.org is unaffected. I won't guess at the board's reasons.

Nothing about how my teams ship has changed since the news broke. The repos are public if you want to watch.

I've worked under Matt for years and I'm grateful for the company he built. People can argue about the rest.

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.