However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic

What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.

When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.”

And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.

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

Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence - https://smackernews.com/item/49636283 HN - 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://smackernews.com/item/49683265 HN) into this one, which is why the timestamps of some of the comments are older.

As someone that’s pretty much worked in/with WP for my entire career, it’s always seemed like the worst of both worlds - distributed and slow-moving, yet still ultimately controlled to a massive extent by a single individual.

These kinds of absurd situations just slowly push people toward Shopify, other CMSes, etc. There will be no grand exodus, because too many companies are intertwined to the WP ecosystem. But combined with AI, the horrible design of Gutenberg, and half a dozen other things, I really worry for the future of WP. At this point I generally only recommend it to people that need something extremely customized. Other platforms are easier to use and don’t have the soap opera drama.

If you don't use contracts, you don't have any contracts to worry about. If you don't have a tour rider, you don't have a tour rider to argue about. If you don't have a booking agent, you don't have a booking agent to argue with.

To us, every moment we remained unfettered and in control was a success. We never had a manager. We never had a booking agent. We never had a lawyer. We never took an advance from a record company. We booked our own tours, paid our own bills, made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences. The results of that methodology speak for themselves: Nobody ever told us what to do, and nobody took any of our money.

If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/159-employees-are-leaving-...

[2] https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-ma...

ETA: Or better yet a clearer statement that nothing about this is clear.

Although I guarantee they would run it into the ground without him. I just have a feeling. The people going after Mullenweg are not backseat drivers, they're backseat critics. They have no idea how to drive, they just know when other people are doing it wrong.

If you don't want people like Mullenweg treating your business like a toy, try not having an internet monoculture. There were plenty of competitors to Wordpress that didn't have an insane database schema, but web programmers are herd animals. Somehow they made the only competitor with traction Drupal, which was way worse. You all chose to hitch your wagon to Mullenweg (and DHH for that matter), now it's their wagon.

They both also made it easy to fork at any time, which is evidence that their enemies are parasites imo. Mullenweg is literally fighting private equity that doesn't want to host their own infrastructure because it wouldn't be profitable, but they also don't want to contribute. And the internet cries for them, because the internet was looking for a bargain.

Facebook is a good example on how to structure your company to keep control of it.

and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well,” a company spokesperson shared

Did anyone else think "what the fuck did I just read" after this sentence? Did Matt write it himself while posing as a "spokesperson"? This reads like that time Trump wrote in pseudonymously to a newspaper about how amazing and perfect Trump was.

Oh, I hadn't finished reading. The whole article is a WTF did I just read.

ctrl+f

photomatt

...hmm. Guess we'll just have to wait a couple hours.

Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.”

Uhhh, that's not normal... is it?

If you can pull a bunch of shenanigans to get around being fired by your bosses, then the system isn't working.

I've actually never seen anything like it. Is this what the WP community are like? I think that would break me too.

Microsoft has done plenty of awful things in its day, but I've never seen people diagnose Steve Ballmer with mental disorders and wish him harm, let alone that would become just the accepted majoritarian narrative around him, as it seems to be around Matt Mullenweg. It seems wild.

More broadly, why is there a 'WP drama' sub-Reddit? Why are there blogs documenting all of this with glee? Why are people registering domains to post screeds about this? In other words, why has a cottage industry sprung up around - as far as I can tell - bullying Matt Mullenweg?

I don't know what to make of it. Who are the WP community, that this is how they engage? Is there some big 4chan-WordPress overlap I'm not aware of? Is this an outgrowth of teenage faux-radicalism off Tumblr? I genuinely don't know, but it seems very off-putting. If this is what the WP community are like, I sure wouldn't want to become involved in it.

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.

Every single one of them I saw so far has the same bad faith attacks, claiming that that guy's mental health would be compromised - and then nothing else other than implying that corporate processes are correct and you are to shut up.

Are there real people with opinions about this? I'd like to hear them.