Automattic Minus Matt

What’s the bigger tragedy? That a creator gets separated from their life’s work, or that the effort to assert control over that work just alienates the creator from the community they built?

In the past two years, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has let both situations play out in his name. The first, which kicked off two years ago with a fiery speech at WordCamp, put the open-source project at odds with some of its largest supporters, while forever tarnishing Mullenweg’s good-guy reputation. The target of Mullenweg’s ire was WP Engine, a company that had built successful brand in the WordPress ecosystem, arguably upstaging Automattic, the company that has traditionally led the WordPress project.

Mullenweg believed WP Engine didn’t do enough to support the open-source project. WP Engine disagreed. Everyone sued one another, and it became perhaps the biggest tech story in the months before everyone became obsessed with AI.

Things quieted down for a bit, only to pick up in a big way this week after Automattic’s board suspended Mullenweg from his CEO role and put the WordPress creator on a leave of absence. The news, which our pals at 404 Media broke, suggests that whatever had gotten into Mullenweg in 2024 had now extended to the company’s board.

“I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied,” Mullenweg wrote in a company Slack channel, according to the report. He’s now been temporarily replaced by the man he claims conspired against him, Automattic CFO Mark Davies.

(Mullenweg still has a role on the board, but given that the board just removed him from the CEO role, something tells me that the only thing working in his favor there are Robert’s Rules of Order.)

The dramatic, sudden removal leaves a lot of questions up in the air about Mullenweg, particularly what might have been happening behind the scenes and whether he had done anything to necessitate such a dramatic move beyond what’s already public knowledge. There may be some personal issues behind the scenes that we’re not privy to. It‘s possible that the controversies of the past two years have created a financial hole that we can’t personally see because Automattic is a private company. We don’t know.

But what we do know suggests that a leader that many believed held a Zuckerberg-like iron grip around his company is in fact at risk of negative performance reviews just like anyone else in the organization. I mean, after all, his first name is literally in the name of the company.

It’s not to be forgotten just what sort of chaos he wrought in the months after the WP Engine blowup. His employees were pushed to take a generous severance if they weren’t behind his public actions. He began sparring with online foes, no matter if they were important to the history of the WordPress project, like plugin-maker Joost de Valk. He intentionally stopped progress on WordPress feature updates, and blocked WP Engine from using a plugin repository that, up to that point, had been free—and that a court eventually forced Mullenweg to walk back. And in an effort to prevent leaks, the company even took the step of putting unique watermarks on a private chat platform to tie any leaks to a specific individual.

It wasn’t that Mullenweg disagreed with the way WP Engine made money off of WordPress that was the problem. It was the fact that he turned this disagreement into a my-way-or-the-highway fork in the road even for passive observers. He forced his open-source community to choose a side. That cost talented people jobs, and that discouraged people who hadn’t already invested in WordPress to look elsewhere.

In that light, it would be completely reasonable for a board to look at the damage wrought, ask themselves, “Why are we letting this guy run our business into the ground,” and take action.

Yes, Mullenweg made this tool and fostered the environment that made it valuable. But he also let other people build on top of it, and eventually, a community flourished. And seemingly overnight, he forgot that he was simply a steward of a community. It was everyone else that made the community important. All because he couldn’t stand the idea that someone else was making lots of money from the idea that he personally chose to open source.

That this is only a leave of absence speaks to the fact that he matters to the WordPress community, even if he’s not exactly that community’s favorite person right now. But it was clear to even a casual observer that he needed to be kept in check two years ago. Now that there’s smoldering wreckage in the form of the consequences of his actions, is it too late to get some of that goodwill back?