Product2 publishers3 min readPublished
Mullenweg declares himself back in control of Automattic while the company still says he is on leave
Automattic put Matt Mullenweg on paid leave on Wednesday and made its CFO interim CEO. Two days later Mullenweg told staff on Slack that the board is back in agreement, and no board member has confirmed it.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Mullenweg told Automattic staff on Wednesday that board members had conspired to put him on paid leave and had installed CFO Mark Davies as interim CEO, an account a company spokesperson confirmed.
- Early Friday he posted in Automattic's Slack that he is in control of the company again, per a screenshot seen by TechCrunch and confirmed by two employee sources.
- TechCrunch also heard that Mullenweg had removed all admins from Automattic's Slack the day before, and had posted about being a pirate in a message that included cursing.
- On X on Friday afternoon Mullenweg wrote that a company without a coup attempt every few years is not hiring strong enough leaders, and said he thinks this was his fifth.
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Why it matters
- exposure Anyone billing clients for sites and inboxes on Automattic property is exposed to a control dispute they can only read through one party's Slack posts, because the company's own statements still put its founder on leave.
- constraint Normal vendor diligence has nowhere to go here: a private board has not explained the vote or its apparent reversal, so buyers are left pricing operational facts like who holds admin access.
- decision Teams with an Automattic renewal this quarter have to decide now whether to fund a warm second host and keep domains at a registrar they control. They will decide before knowing whether any of it is needed.
- precedent A leave vote that lasts two days with no company statement sets the expectation that the next change at Automattic reaches customers as a leaked screenshot first.
The person who has to answer for this on Monday is the developer who moved a client's store onto WordPress.com in the spring and cannot now tell that client who runs the vendor. Automattic owns WordPress.com, Tumblr and Beeper [13]. The reason for the board's vote has not been reported [2].
On the record, Automattic has said one thing twice. A spokesperson told TechCrunch that Mullenweg was on leave and that CFO Mark Davies was interim CEO [4], and told The Verge that Mullenweg was "currently on leave", confirming Davies' appointment [5]. Asked to confirm Friday's message, the company did not respond to TechCrunch [17]. In the Slack post itself, Mullenweg wrote, "A lot happened in the past 48 hours that we need to sort out, and I hope much of it was a misunderstanding, because I have huge respect and regard for those involved." [6]
Davies' publicly known run as interim CEO lasted two days, Wednesday to Friday [19]. Mullenweg said he voted against the leave decision [15], and Davies told staff that Mullenweg would remain a board member, according to 404 Media [14].
The one change reported from inside the company is administrative. Davies' Slack account was deactivated, sources told TechCrunch, and Mullenweg had removed all of the workspace's admins the day before [7][8]. For a company that runs on Slack, whoever holds admin is the answer employees act on, and TechCrunch wrote that it is hard to know whether he is trolling or whether legitimate changes have been made [22]. Asked whether he was trolling, Mullenweg said, "I'm not a troll I'm a pirate, obviously." [9]
He has also tied the episode to his litigation. On Reddit and X, Mullenweg suggested that Silver Lake, the private equity firm that is majority owner of WP Engine and a party to the suit involving him and Automattic, was involved in a plan to "destroy" his life [11].
The part a customer can actually price is the move itself. For each Automattic-owned surface, the two numbers that matter are how many days a move would take and whether finishing it needs the vendor's cooperation. Content export, DNS control, billing continuity and the name on the admin account each have their own answer. The surfaces that take weeks and need Automattic's help are the ones worth planning around this quarter. Mullenweg ran a version of the same exercise in public, asking on X for sysadmins and security researchers to help him move his own things hosted at Automattic elsewhere, even as he supported Davies as CEO [10].
The blog post he had told TechCrunch was coming [17] arrived under the title "Major Life Announcement". It was about making an offer to buy a houseboat [16].
What to watch
- A statement from Automattic or its board naming who is currently CEO.
- Whether Mark Davies stays on as CFO and whether his Slack account is restored.
- Any movement in the WP Engine litigation that Mullenweg has linked to the board vote.