The gossip around Matt Mullenweg’s 33-hour ouster is getting better. Fortune’s Eva Roytburg has found an unnamed person familiar with BlackRock’s Automattic investment who learned of the board revolt from news reports. And still can’t fathom the comeback.
“I don’t understand how he basically reinstated himself and reversed the decision of the vote,” the person said. “That makes no sense to us.”
The source also questioned Mullenweg’s claimed 84% voting control, doubting investors had simply handed him their votes. Mullenweg’s own account, published in 2021, was that funding since 2011 included voting proxies assigning him those rights.
Roytburg’s former-employee interviews supply another curious detail. Senior leaders were expected to defend Mullenweg’s fight with WP Engine without being told his strategy, according to someone who worked closely with him. The source saw little endgame beyond hurting the rival—and wanted anonymity for fear of retaliation.
There are loyalists, too. One former senior employee who took the exit payout praised Mullenweg’s openness to disagreement, and former WooCommerce engineering lead Naman Malhotra defended Mullenweg’s demands for open-source contributions.
Rave Restaurant Group’s September earnings release pitches a pizza promotion with Dr Pepper, then gets to the awkward bit: the CEO says his board is harassing him.
Brandon Solano runs the Dallas-based company behind Pizza Inn and Pie Five. For some godforsaken reason, this thing trades on Nasdaq under the ticker RAVE. According to Rave’s annual report, he asked in August for a board seat and a pay package reaching $2.3 million a year by fiscal 2029. The company’s entire fiscal 2026 profit was $2.9 million.
Chairman Mark Schwarz called the proposal a “non-starter.”
Four days later, Solano formally accused the board of harassment and race- and national-origin discrimination, saying other employees got raises he was denied. He said he’d complained to the Texas Workforce Commission.
Rave hired outside investigators and revealed that it raised Solano’s base salary from $350,000 to $370,000 last year. An October 16 stock filing still lists him as CEO.
So the CEO is still running the company whose board he wants investigated by the state, he hasn’t quite and they haven’t fired him. This is one conference call I’m adding to my calendar.
Hey did you know that Automattic's Matt Mullenweg officiated sci-fi novelist Hugh Howey's wedding?! Well he slips that humblefact into a post on his blog where he re-frames his boardroom drama as experience that he will use to help writers who are joining corporate boards…
After shouting out a milquetoast list of sci fi authors as people he could rep, he suggests that his boardroom drama has led him to "become a bit of an expert in board protections, dynamics, compensation, and such. 🙂"
He takes his self-perceived adorable anecdote one step further by dreaming up deal terms: "1% fee, donated to the WordPress Foundation or Locus Magazine." How altruistic. Altrumattic, even.
A curious development in the Eric Jackson–SRX mystery isyesterday’s announcement that SRX has invested in a company called Onconetix, betting on its pending acquisition of Realbotix. The pitch? Robotic eyeballs with an AI vision system. Mmmmk.
No investment size or purchase price was disclosed, nor was any word of Eric Jackson’s involvement. Given his history as a high-profile investor, you’d think there would at least be a cursory mention of his endorsement. In fact, he didn’t even seem to re-circulate the news on either his X or LinkedIn pages.
This morning I was looking through random microcaps and came across SRX Global (SRXH), which earns most of its paltry revenue from selling dog food. Jackson has been closely tied to SRX since the firm purchased his AI-crypto-type company, EMJX, in June. What the hell?
The stock has been in total freefall since the deal closed. The December 16 deal announcement initially sent it up 23.8%, to $22.62. Through September 23, it has lost 92.5% of that value.
I’d always assumed EJ was a winner, but the stock has fallen sharply overall since the deal announcement.
Digging deeper, I found something else that raised more questions. Jackson was originally supposed to become CEO and chairman, and the company was supposed to go so far as to change its name to EMJX as part of the deal announced last December. Investors had been promised EJ would run the company.
Something happened on the way to the closing
When the deal closed in June, incumbent CEO Kent Cunningham kept his job. Jackson became president of the EMJX platform and head of asset management. The company changed its name from SRx Health Solutions to SRX Global, rather than EMJX, and kept its ticker.
“I signed a deal back in December. Along the way, that deal changed. I had a decision to make.”
He doesn’t say why the change was made or who wanted it.
His tone sounds just a little bitter to me. I get the impression there was some acrimony, but there’s a chance I’m reading too much into too little. He’s plainly irritated with online critics and cites Steve Jobs and Elon Musk as models in how he’s going to ignore his critics. He does note that he bought shares of SRX himself before closing and is underwater, along with friends and family who had bought in… So I guess he’s still invested in the deal and making it work?
Jackson and CEO Kent Cunningham are appearing on a webinar September 30th and I’ll definitely be tuning in for that.
A former employee is suing Campbell’s (of soup) for wrongful termination after he was allegedly fired for reporting his boss’s wild rant in which he says the company makes “bioengineered meat for poor people.” The fired employee has released audio of Campbell’s Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer Martin Bally making the statements as well as calling the company’s Indian employees idiots who “couldn’t think for their fucking selves.”
We’re trying to get ahold of the full audio, which reportedly goes on for over an hour (!). In the meantime, here is the story by a local Detroit station:
Intuit quarterly results are in and they’re good enough where CEO Sasan Goodarzi fels confident enough to wear the most insane outfit we’ve seen in a long time in a CNBC interview. The most baffling part of the twelve minute interview is the fact that at no point did Jon Fortt ask “why the hell are you dressed like that?”
Knives falls fast. Last night Super Micro was notified that it faces Nasdaq de-listing if it does not submit a “compliance plan.” That should be easy, they can just tack it on to the earnings report that they must be furiously working on with their brand new auditor…
Now she’s back with an overview of how the company uses weaselly language “in order to cook revenue guidance.” She makes a very good case that the company is creatively downplaying political ad spending during an election year (because political ads are inherently cyclical revenue) and portraying it as general ad spending to juice its net revenue retention numbers.
The company is using the phrase “political candidate revenue” as a way of “rolling up advocacy revenue (PACs, special interests groups, anything not directly a politician’s campaign itself, etc.) into the ‘non-political’ line in their guidance.”
Buy now, pay later company Klarna was founded nearly twenty years ago by Victor Jacobsson and Sebastian Siemiatkowski. A decade ago, that partnership presumably ended when Jacobsson left the company. According to the Financial Times, he has been a “thorn in the side of Siemiatkowski ever since.”
Now one of Jacobsson’s key allies, Mikael Walther, has been removed from the board by a shareholder vote of over 87%. In a statement, Walther had this to say: “A majority of those present at the general meeting have decided that I shall leave the board. As a result, there will be one fewer independent voice in the boardroom.”
Independent voices or not, this has apparently cemented CEO Siemiatkowski’s control of the board as it prepares for an IPO.
The gossip around Matt Mullenweg’s 33-hour ouster is getting better. Fortune’s Eva Roytburg has found an unnamed person familiar with BlackRock’s Automattic investment who learned of the board revolt from news reports. And still can’t fathom the comeback.
