The Shortest Coup in Tech History: WordPress & Automattic

Transcript

A board voted out the founder on a Wednesday. By Monday, the board was gone. Matt Mullenweg got the resolution removing him 50 minutes before the meeting started. His own chief financial officer was named interim CEO. Within days, that man’s Slack account went dark because nobody remembered to take away the founders’s admin access.

He kicked the other admins out of the company’s Slack, then posted that he was a pirate. Now, this was the same man whose software runs roughly 40% of everything on the internet. The same man who cut off 1.5 million websites in a fight with a private equitybacked host. The same man whose employees were told to align or take the money and never come back. Automattic’s final word on the coup.

He was away for 33 hours and 20 minutes. So, who really controls the company that runs 40% of the web.

In 2002, a teenager in Houston, Texas, started a blog. His name was Matthew Charles Mullenweg, born January 11, 1984. The son of a computer programmer who pushed his kids onto home computers early. He had studied jazz saxophone at a performing arts high school, and as a child, he missed long stretches of school because of migraines. The software he chose for that blog was an open-source platform called B2.

And then the man behind B2, developer Michael Valdrighi, walked away from it. Abandoned code is usually where a story ends. Here it was where one started. In 2003, Mullenweg took the project over. That same year, he and Mike Little created a fork of B2, called it WordPress, and released it under the GNU General Public License.

A fork means you take someone else’s open-source code, copy it, and carry it forward yourself. And the license is what makes that legal. That one decision made by a 19-year-old is the seed of everything that follows in this story. He was also busy elsewhere in 2003 and 2004, co-founding the global multimedia protocols group and helping launch Ping-O-Matic, a tool that told search engines when a blog had been updated. He was enrolled at the University of Houston studying philosophy and political science.

In October 2004, CNET hired him with a promise most students never get. You can work on your own open-source project on company time. So, he dropped out after his sophomore year and moved to San Francisco in the United States. WordPress was no longer a hobby squeezed into nights and weekends. It was part of the job.

He left CNET in 2005 and founded Automattic, a company named with the extra T from his own first name. From the start, it was fully distributed with no head office to walk into. And here is the part that sounds strange given everything that comes later. Mullenweg did not make himself chief executive. He hired Toni Schneider as CEO specifically so he could learn how to manage a large organization while somebody else did it. For years the arrangement held with Schneider running the company and Mullenweg building the product.

Schneider would sit in that chair from 2006 until 2014. So picture the man at this point in the story. a college dropout in his early 20s, owner of nothing but a fork of someone else’s abandoned blog software, deliberately handing the top job to an adult. The product he was quietly building would eventually run a large share of the entire internet. And the man he hired to be the grown-up in the room, Toni Schneider, would one day sit on the board that tried to remove him. What happens when the quiet product guy decides he wants the CEO chair back?

In January 2014, Matt Mullenweg took back the job he had handed away almost a decade earlier, replacing Toni Schneider as chief executive of Automattic. The product guy now owned the org chart, and he moved fast. He led Automattic’s expansion through a run of acquisitions. Woo Commerce in 2015, The Adivist Magazine in 2018, Tumblr in 2019, Pocket Casts in 2021, and Beeper in 2024. E-commerce, long- form journalism, a social network, podcasts, messaging, one open-source blogging tool, had become a conglomerate.

In 2016, Mullenweg received the Hines Award for Technology, the Economy, and Employment, honored for helping to democratize online publishing. That was the public story, and it was a good one. By 2021, Automattic’s valuation had reached 7.5 billion United States dollars, and WordPress was running 28 million websites, roughly 40% of everything on the internet. 40% of the web is not a market share. It is infrastructure.

Here is the part that matters for everything that follows. Automattic owns the commercial business WordPress com while the WordPress foundation is a separate 5001 C 3 nonprofit dedicated to the open-source project and it is not owned by automatic. Mullenweg heads both a structure that carries obvious potential conflicts of interest for a charity that is not supposed to be entangled with a fur profit’s commercial activity. Even the company’s name is personal. Automattic is spelled with two T’s because of its founders’s first name.

So the man who controlled the money also controlled the trademark policy, the plug-in directory, and the servers everyone depended on. He was not shy about using that position either. Mullenweg has said he prefers to settle disputes in the court of public opinion, describing his own approach as brinksmanship because the cost of actual litigation could put automatic in a tough spot. In 2013, developers on the marketplace in Vado were barred from speaking at WordPress events after he criticized how it licensed themes. In 2016, he accused the Israeli website builder Wix comm of reusing WordPress code without honoring the GNU General Public License.

In 2022, he went after the American hosting company GoDaddy for not reinvesting enough in the WordPress project. There were warning signs inside the Empire 2. In February 2024, Mullenweg began a 3-month sbatical. And during it, he got into a public fight with a transgender Tumblr user who was banned after posting that she wished he would die, sharing her private account details on his personal blog. Transgender employees of Tumblr and Automattic then posted on the official staff blog that his response was unwarranted and harmful and did not speak for them. a founder who ran a nonprofit he would later describe as belonging to him personally was now picking fights with his own users.

When one man controls the company, the foundation and 40% of the web who is left with the power to tell him no.

In September 2024 at Word Camp US, the annual gathering of the WordPress world, Matt Mullenweg got on stage and lit the fuse. 3 days earlier, he had published a post on his personal site praising open-source and attacking companies that treat it like oil in the ground. Something to extract and walk away from. His target was WP Engine, an American hosting company founded in 2010 in Austin, Texas, that built its business on WordPress code. And the real villain in his telling was the firm that had bought control of it.

Silver Lake, the private equity giant that put $250 million US into WP Engine in 2018 and took a majority stake. Silver Lake, Mullenweg wrote, has 102 billion US in assets under management and does not care about your open-source ideals. It just wants a return on capital. On the last day of the conference, he promised his spiciest talk ever, and he delivered. He argued WP Engine’s contributions to WordPress were meager compared to Automattic’s.

He named the Silver Lake partner on WP Engine’s board, and he called on the community to boycott. He even suggested out loud that this might be the last word camp where WP Engine had a booth. at an event WP Engine had paid to sponsor. The room did not simply cheer. In the Q&A, attendees asked him why he had gone so hard, and one WordPress user publicly called for him to step down from WordPress.org leadership. Behind the speech was a number.

Automattic had put a 7-year trademark term sheet in front of WP Engine. either 10% of gross revenue paid monthly for the right to use WordPress branding or 8% taken from the salaries of WP Engine staff working on WordPress tasks directed by Automattic. WP Engine said that worked out to a $32 million US check every year out of roughly $400 million in annual revenue. WP Engines lawyers sent a cease and desist on September 23, alleging Mullenweg had threatened a scorched earth nuclear approach if they did not pay. Automattic lawyers fired back their own cease and desist the same day, claiming trademark infringement. Then Mullenweg reached for the switch only he could flip.

On September 25, 2024, WordPress cut WP Engine off from its servers, the plug-in and theme repository, the security updates, everything that hit the roughly 1.5 million websites hosted on WP Engine. And after the outcry, he granted a temporary reprieve 2 days later. A day before the block, the WordPress Foundation’s trademark policy had quietly been rewritten to warn against confusing use of the letters WP, naming WP Engine as the example. And on October 2, 2024, WP Engine sued Automattic and Mullenweg for extortion and abuse of power in a filing of nearly 100 pages and 11 counts, which the defendants denied. Automattic called it meritless and hired the celebrated attorney Neil Cadial to defend it.

He had just declared war on a firm managing 102 billion US. But inside his own company, people were already reaching for the exit. So what happens when a founder asks his staff to pick a side?

On October 3, 2024, Matt Mullenweg put a price on loyalty. Any automatic employee who disagreed with him could resign that same evening and take what he called the most generous buyout package possible. $30,000 or 6 months of salary, whichever was higher. The conditions were brutal in their simplicity because those who took the money lost access to their work loginins that same night and they would never be eligible for rehire. On October 7, Mullenweg announced the result.

159 employees, 8.4% of the entire company had walked. He called it an emotional roller coaster and admitted that most of the people who left had worked directly on the WordPress ecosystem at the heart of the fight. One purge was not enough. The following week, Automattic made a second offer. 9 months of salary this time, aimed at the people who could not afford to quit the first time around.

But employees got only 4 hours to decide, and this deal added a new term. Anyone who took it would be shut out of the WordPress community as well. Mullenweg then made another buyout offer and warned staff who spoke to the press that they would be fired, telling them to exit. gracefully or be fired the next day with no severance. While Mullenweg was reshaping his workforce, the courts were closing in. On December 10, 2024, Judge Aerysley Martinez of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary injunction ordering automatic and Mullenweg to stop blocking, disabling, and interfering with WP Engine’s access to WordPress.

Then in February 2025, a WP Engine customer filed a class action lawsuit accusing Automattic and Mullenweg of deliberately abusing their power over the WordPress ecosystem to repeatedly disrupt contracts. The claim was that ordinary website owners, people with no stake in this feud at all, had seen the maintenance and security of their own sites disrupted. Inside the open-source project, the circle kept tightening. Mullenweg deactivated the WordPress accounts of several community members after two of them allegedly said they plan to lead a forked version of the software. They denied having such plans. But sources told TechCrunch that he deactivated their accounts anyway along with those of other contributors. On January 9, 2025, Fij Bu, the representative of the WordPress sustainability team, resigned over a Reddit post Mullenweg had written on Christmas Eve asking what drama he should create in 2025 and criticized what he called unsustainable leadership.

Mullenweg thanked him for reminding him the sustainability team existed, announced that he was disbanding it and closed its Slack channel. In April 2025 came the reckoning for everyone else as Automattic laid off 16% of its staff, including people who had been at the company for more than a decade. So by the middle of 2025, the man who built WordPress had thinned out his company. his board of volunteers and his critics. And he was still losing in court and WP Engine was not finished because its lawyers were about to go after something far more dangerous than a trademark argument. What happens to a founder when the other side accuses him of deleting the evidence on WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram?

September 9, 2026, a Wednesday morning,

on a Slack channel visible to every employee at Automattic, Matt Mullenweg typed out the biggest news of his career, and it was about himself. He wrote that he would not be able to make the executive leadership meeting the next day because Mark Davies, the company’s chief financial officer, had conspired with board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker behind his back and voted to put him on a paid leave of absence. He added one line that told you everything about how he felt. I voted against that. Then he wished Mark and everyone else the very best.

A follow-up message sharpened the knife. Mullenweg clarified that Davies had been voted in as interim CEO, that he had received the board resolution 50 minutes before the meeting started, and that he had asked repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, and been denied. In the same Slack channel, Schneider, the man Mullenweg had once hired to run the company, told staff that the board had decided to ask Matt to step away, and that Davies would steer the ship while he was out. Davies wrote that he intended to support Matt, the board, Automattic, and the customers, and that it would take him some time to come up to speed. He also told employees that Mullenweg remained on the board of directors and would still have a voice in setting direction.

Automattic confirmed it in writing to TechCrunch. Matt Mullenweg was on leave. Mark Davies would lead as interim CEO and the board had full confidence in his leadership. Over at WordPressor, executive director Mary Hubard told the open-source community that the project was not affected, that Matt remained its leader, and that the teams and priorities carried on as planned. Inside the company, the reaction split down the middle.

Some employees told colleagues they were ecstatic or relieved, while others felt uneasy because whatever else this was, it was more instability. Nobody would say why the board had moved or why it had moved. Now, one person floated a theory that it had something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, which ended on September 7 that year, and from which he tended to come back with ideas. That evening, Mullenweg went to X and started dropping hints of his own. In one post, he wrote that they had a pretty good chance of getting a judge to say he spoiled evidence in a malicious way, trying to hide something.

A reference to the WP Engine litigation, and he denied the allegation vehemently. WP Engine had accused him of destroying evidence tied to the case inside apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. He said he now expected smear attacks, National Inquirer style rumors and hit pieces, and claimed one attempt had already happened when his Nikon D6 camera was stolen at Burning Man and recovered a day later with nothing usable among the more than 2,000 photos on the memory card. Then he shared a few pictures of art from the festival. on X and on Reddit. He went further, suggesting that Silver Lake, the private equity firm that is the majority owner of WP Engine, was involved in a plan to destroy his life.

He posted that things were different than they appeared and asked publicly for CISDMEN’s and security researchers to help him move his own things off automatic systems while saying he supported Davies as CEO. on Reddit. He replied to people speculating about what this meant for open source with five words. He was here just fine. The board had voted. The company had confirmed it.

The founder had been removed. So if Matt Mullenweg was out, why did nobody think to take away his admin access?

Here is what a boardroom coup looks like when the founder still holds the keys. Matt Mullenweg did not pack a box, did not hand over a laptop, and did not go quietly into a paid leave of absence. Instead, multiple sources told TechCrunch that he removed the other admins from Automattic’s company Slack, the digital nervous system of a fully distributed company with no offices to lock him out of. Then he posted a line into that Slack that landed like a flare in a dry field. He was a pirate now and he cursed, something Mullenweg was famously known for never doing.

He added a note that read like a dare, saying that if this counted as an HR problem, someone should reign him in because his usual wranglers were with Mark Davies. Remember who Mark Davies was supposed to be that week? Automattic’s chief financial officer had been voted in as interim chief executive with what the company called the full confidence of the board and the board’s own message to staff said he would steer the ship while Mullenweg was away. By Friday, sources told TechCrunch that Davey’s Slack account had been deactivated. The man appointed to run the company had gone dark inside the company’s own chat.

Early on Friday morning, Mullenweg posted again to Automattic Slack, and the message opened with a pop culture wink. Don’t call it a comeback. He told employees the board was back in agreement, that he was in control of Automattic, that a lot had happened in the past 48 hours and that he hoped much of it was a misunderstanding because he had huge respect for those involved. Then he dropped a link to the YouTube video for LLC Cool J’s Mama said knock you out. At the time of TechCrunch’s reporting, nobody inside Automattic had heard any confirmation from the board itself.

So the whole company was left reading a Slack post and a rap video trying to work out who actually ran the place. TechCrunch asked Mullenweg directly whether his claim of being back as chief executive was legitimate and he promised a blog post was coming. When the blog post arrived, it was about him buying a housebo. So the reporters asked the obvious follow-up whether the whole thing was trolling and he answered with a sentence that will outlive most press releases. He was not a troll.

He was a pirate obviously. On X that same Friday morning, he wrote that boards are never boring, followed by a laughing and crying emoji. Elsewhere on X, he said things were different than they appeared and asked for CIS admins and security researchers to help him move his own material off automatic systems. And in both his Reddit and exposts, he pointed the finger at Silver Lake, the private equity firm that took a majority stake in WP Engine with a $250 million investment in 2018, suggesting it was involved in a plan to destroy his life. For roughly a day and a half, Automattic had two men claiming the chair, one of them locked out of Slack and the other quoting hip hop.

Mullenweg never issued an official comment about his return. Though he noted on X that this was probably the fifth time he had faced what he called a coup. And through all of it, the company that had confirmed his removal in writing on Wednesday said nothing at all on Friday, ignoring repeated requests for comment. Was this a real restoration or the most public bluff in tech?

The answer came on a Saturday evening just after 5:00 Eastern time in an email to TechCrunch. An Automattic spokesperson said Matt Mullenweg was the chairman and chief executive of Automattic with the full support of the board and pointed to the many executives and employees backing him online. That online support appeared to be posts on X that Mullenweg himself had been resharing from his own account. 3 days after the board voted him out, the company that had confirmed his removal in writing now confirmed his return in writing. And then the people who had voted against him started to disappear.

Multiple sources told TechCrunch that Automattic’s board was out after the failed attempt to put Mullenweg on paid leave. Toni Schneider, the founding chief executive who now runs the social network Blue Sky, resigned his board seat and then quietly deleted the paragraph on his personal website that described him as an Automattic board member and special adviser. Sue Decker resigned too and updated her LinkedIn profile to show her automatic board service running from March 2020 to September 2026. Even while her name still sat on the company’s board of directors page, General Ann Dunwoody did not resign. TechCrunch confirmed that Mullenweg removed her.

The purge did not stop at the boardroom door. Automattic’s chief legal officer, Andy Missen, updated his LinkedIn to show he was no longer with the company as of September 2026. And TechCrunch understood that Mullenweg let him go. So was Mark Davies, the chief financial officer who was supposed to be the interim chief executive, the man Mullenweg had accused in Slack of conspiring behind his back. Days earlier, the board had told employees it had full confidence in Mark’s leadership.

Now the confidence and the board were gone. Asked directly about the board changes, automatic declined to give specifics. In an email that landed after midnight Pacific time on Sunday, a spokesperson said that Matt and the leadership team had great respect for everyone involved, that they could not comment on individuals, that they were thankful for the contributions of those who left, and that they were excited about the road ahead with Matt at the helm. Then came the line that would outlive the whole episode. Matt was away for only 33 hours and 20 minutes and they were now back to work.

33 hours and 20 minutes, time to the minute, as if the coup had been a delayed flight. What is still missing from all of it is the reason. TechCrunch reported that what prompted the board’s vote remains unclear. The obvious backdrop is the WP Engine lawsuit where the hosting company has accused Mullenweg of destroying evidence in apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram, an allegation he has vehemently denied. Mullenweg himself had told his own team he received the board resolution 50 minutes before the meeting and was refused even a few hours for independent legal review.

Four directors moved against the founder of a company once valued at $7.5 billion US sitting on software that runs roughly 40% of the web and they lost in a day and a half. If a board can vote out a founder on Wednesday and be gone itself by Monday who actually controls the company that runs 40% of the internet.

So what actually happened? No filing has answered that. Automattic never said why four directors moved and TechCrunch reported the reason remains unclear. What we do know is how it ended. Toni Schneider resigned his board seat.

Sue Decker resigned and Mullenweg removed General Ann Dunwoody. He also let go of CFO Mark Davies, the man who was supposed to be interim CEO along with Chief Legal Officer Andy Missen. The company’s only comment was a line about respect for everyone involved and one number 33 hours and 20 minutes. Look at the shape of the power that survived. Mullenweg runs the commercial business and heads the WordPress foundation that holds the trademark and he once told the Verge the foundation simply belongs to him personally. He has said he prefers to settle disputes in the court of public opinion and described his own approach as brinksmanship.

The fights are still open. WP Engine’s lawsuit alleging extortion and abuse of power is live. A customer class action filed in February 2025 is live and WP Engine has accused him of destroying evidence in messaging apps. And the allegation that he spoiled evidence is exactly what he raised publicly the night the board struck. Here is the uncomfortable lesson. Governance only works if a founder can actually be removed.

This board voted on a Wednesday and by Monday the board was gone and the founder was back at the helm of software behind roughly 40% of the web.