Matt Mullenweg put on 'leave of absence'

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ddoener about 2 hours ago 71 commentsRead Article on 404media.co

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Discussion (71 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Shank•about 1 hour 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.

SaltyBackendGuy•about 1 hour ago

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•about 1 hour ago

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.

gottorf•5 minutes ago

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.

actionfromafar•8 minutes ago

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

telotortium•20 minutes ago

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.

patternMachine•about 1 hour ago

Barring truly bad behavior this is how executives get fired.

tibbydudeza•about 1 hour ago

Spend more time with my family :).

gkoberger•about 1 hour ago

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.

stephenlf•37 minutes ago

The entire internet is breathing a sigh of relief

dzonga•17 minutes ago

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•2 minutes ago

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.

michael0church•37 minutes ago

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.

pbreit•about 1 hour ago

No reason given?

downrightmike•4 minutes ago

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

chris_wot•31 minutes ago

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

bigiain•26 minutes ago

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.

biglyburrito•about 1 hour ago

"Unfortunately"??

gkoberger•about 1 hour ago

"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•about 1 hour ago

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

Gualdrapo•about 1 hour ago

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•17 minutes ago

> WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet.

Unfortunately.

Arnt•about 1 hour ago

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•about 1 hour ago

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

solarkraft•about 1 hour ago

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

00ze•29 minutes ago

> 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.

reticulates•about 1 hour ago

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

Spinfusor•33 minutes ago

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

reticulates•8 minutes ago

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.

chris_wot•29 minutes ago

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.

pluc•about 1 hour ago

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

garbagepatch•about 1 hour ago

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

pluc•about 1 hour ago

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

_fw•about 1 hour ago

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.

hermitcrab•about 1 hour ago

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

What is wrong with these people?

gkoberger•about 1 hour ago

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•about 1 hour ago

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.

BeetleB•33 minutes ago

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

wmf•about 1 hour ago

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

bedroom_jabroni•8 minutes ago

Quick, somebody back up the WP Plugins repository.

pier25•31 minutes ago

It's impressive this took so long.

0xDEADBEEFCAFE•about 1 hour ago

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•43 minutes ago

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

0xDEADBEEFCAFE•28 minutes ago

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•15 minutes ago

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

kmeisthax•12 minutes ago

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.

ChoosesBarbecue•about 1 hour ago

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

minimaxir•44 minutes ago

It never ended.

ChoosesBarbecue•34 minutes ago

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

solarkraft•about 1 hour ago

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•about 1 hour ago

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•23 minutes ago

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•10 minutes ago

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.

nubinetwork•about 1 hour ago

Good riddance

echoangle•about 1 hour ago

> 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•26 minutes ago

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•14 minutes ago

they own automatic.com right?

chris_wot•32 minutes ago

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

ramon156•about 1 hour ago

Reminds me of the first season of Succession

tibbydudeza•about 1 hour ago

Finally.

dcrazy•about 1 hour ago

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

biglyburrito•about 1 hour ago

No, it's called "voting".

antonvs•10 minutes ago

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.

bellowsgulch•about 1 hour ago

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•19 minutes ago

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•10 minutes ago

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