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Boardroom intrigue

More details emerge from the Matt Mullenweg coup/counter-coup

by CranDiscuss

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.

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Boardroom intrigue

Authormattic

by LewDiscuss
Satirical portrait of Matt Mullenweg against an orange brush blot.

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.

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Links

More turmoil at Matt Mullenweg’s Automattic: Interim CFO out! Company posts bizarre farewell on X

by CranDiscuss

Another abrupt departure since Matt Mullenweg’s return to Automattic after last month’s thrilling boardroom coup drama: interim CFO Jeremy Klaperman, out after less than a month, Sarah Perez reports at TechCrunch.

The departures have piled up since Mullenweg’s return. He let CFO Mark Davies and legal chief Andy Missan go; board members Toni Schneider and Sue Decker resigned, while Mullenweg fired other board member Ann Dunwoody.

Automattic originally put out a boilerplate departure message. “Automattic will always be grateful for Jeremy Klaperman’s leadership.” TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez wrote an article citing an unnamed company source who said that Klaperman resented the outside-candidate search and resigned after a demotion following a disagreement with Mullenweg over a performance-review project.

Then Automattic took to X with a snarky vaguepost:

At Automattic, we consider it best practice to evaluate external candidates for critical roles alongside internal people stepping up. We are always talking to and recruiting the best talent. Sometimes people are offended or surprised by this and they resign, sometimes it has led to amazing mentoring or advising situations. We won't comment on any specific person, but as a company we're always trying to optimize and redefine ourselves to serve our customers better and promote the ideals we aspire to around Open Source, freedom, liberty, autonomy, and hackers.

Text version

At Automattic, we consider it best practice to evaluate external candidates for critical roles alongside internal people stepping up. We are always talking to and recruiting the best talent. Sometimes people are offended or surprised by this and they resign, sometimes it has led to amazing mentoring or advising situations. We won’t comment on any specific person, but as a company we’re always trying to optimize and redefine ourselves to serve our customers better and promote the ideals we aspire to around Open Source, freedom, liberty, autonomy, and hackers.

 

Petty-posting about a departure followed by an appeal to esprit de corps, wild.

Filed underAutomatticMark DaviesMatt Mullenweg
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Management

Matt Mullenweg wants his vanity top-level domain name

by LewDiscuss

Not content with his eponymous blog URL (ma.tt) or company (Automattic), Matt Mullenweg & co have now applied for ownership of the top-level domain extension .matt. TLDs are expensive, the application alone costs $227,000.

It’s well-known after last month’s failed boardroom coup that Matt controls Automattic through large ownership of the voting stock, so Matt (despite once describing himself as “post-economic”) is dragging minority shareholders along for the purchase of his vanity domain extension. Maybe it’s moves like these, which lead lead to his removal in the first place?

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Lawsuits

Mullenweg’s “full nuclear” message

by CranDiscuss

According to court documents publicly refiled September 30, Matt Mullenweg was talking about going “full nuclear with WPE,” with “partnerships/merger/M&A as an exit,” before the WordPress feud went public.

The August 15, 2024 Slack message was put to Mullenweg during his deposition. He said he didn’t recall it but could see it in the document; he wanted more context before explaining “full nuclear.”

Another refiled exhibit opens a window onto WordPress.org’s “Mission Control” dashboard. Automattic CTO Barry Abrahamson testified that it graphed active installations of rival WP Engine’s ACF Pro plugin “that WordPress.org knows about.” The data came through WordPress.org’s API; he said it was anonymized and aggregated before storage.

Matt Mullenweg (deposition testimony), U.S. District Court, Northern District of California / CourtListener
ECF 418-1: Mullenweg deposition excerpts, refiled September 30, 2026
Barry Abrahamson (deposition testimony), U.S. District Court, Northern District of California / CourtListener
ECF 419: Abrahamson deposition excerpts, refiled September 30, 2026
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Internal memos · Lawsuits

Court revives antitrust claims against Automattic, citing internal ‘carrot and stick’ message

by BernsteinDiscuss
Satirical portrait of Matt Mullenweg against an orange brush blot.

“If they don’t take the carrot we’ll give them the stick.”

That’s internal correspondence quoted by WP Engine and reproduced in a September 24 court order reviving its antitrust claims against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg.

The carrot was a trademark license: WP Engine could pay Automattic a percentage of its revenue. The stick? Well, as we saw, Mullenweg: blasted WP Engine at WordCamp US, blocked its access to WordPress.org, and added a login checkbox requiring users to declare they weren’t affiliated with WP Engine. In WP Engine’s account, that’s what refusing the carrot got you.

WP Engine alleges at least 11 competitors were targeted for multimillion-dollar deals. The order recounts an alleged “Restriction of choice plan”—a remarkably candid name for something happening around open-source software.

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín found the allegations sufficient to let four antitrust claims proceed. The WordPress.org checkbox requiring users to deny any affiliation with WP Engine also supports a plausible illegal-tying claim: access conditioned on not dealing with a competitor.

These remain allegations, not a liability finding. In the order, Automattic also won dismissal of WP Engine’s computer-fraud-law extortion claim without leave to amend.

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California
WP Engine v. Automattic: Order re Motions to Dismiss — September 24, 2026
Filed underAraceli Martínez-OlguínAutomatticMatt MullenwegWordpressWP Engine
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