The board voted, and Matt Mullenweg refused to leave. The Automattic founder, who built the company behind WordPress, was placed on forced paid leave by his own directors last week, with chief financial officer Mark Davies installed as acting chief executive. By September 12, Mullenweg was back, and the company was telling reporters he had never really been gone.
The sequence played out over a few chaotic days. After the board vote, Mullenweg removed other administrators from the company’s Slack, told employees everything was resolved and that he was in control again, and wrote in Slack, “I’m a pirate now.” A company spokesperson told TechCrunch after 5 p.m. Eastern on September 12 that Mullenweg is “chairman and CEO of Automattic, with full support of the board.”
The directors who voted against him were not anonymous. The group included Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider and Sue Decker, according to people familiar with the matter. Mullenweg voted against his own leave and has described the move as roughly the fifth “coup” he has faced. Schneider, Automattic’s founding chief executive who now leads the social network Bluesky, has reportedly resigned from the board, and the board’s composition is still shifting.
The fight is about control of a company with an outsize role in the open web. Automattic owns WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr and Beeper, and WordPress itself powers a large share of the internet’s websites. Mullenweg has spent years as the platform’s most visible and combative voice, and his conflicts with competitors and critics have been a running feature of the company’s public life.
The board’s attempt to sideline him was an unusual move for a private company whose founder still holds significant control. Forced paid leave is a mechanism boards use when they have lost confidence in a chief executive, and the fact that it was reversed within days suggests Mullenweg retained enough power to undo it. The “I’m a pirate now” comment, playful on its face, read to employees as a declaration that the board’s authority did not apply to him.
The turnover on the board adds to the uncertainty. Losing Schneider, who founded the company before Mullenweg took it over and who has credibility in both the tech and the open-source communities, narrows the group of people with standing to challenge him. Analysts said the episode is likely to settle the governance question in Mullenweg’s favor for now, but at the cost of a board that has been through a public rupture.
The backdrop is a years-long feud over WordPress itself. Mullenweg has spent much of the past two years in open conflict with the hosting company WP Engine, a dispute that spilled into the open with legal filings and public accusations, and which many in the community saw as damaging the platform’s reputation. His aggressive stewardship has won him loyal supporters and equally committed critics, and the board’s move reads as an attempt to de-escalate a situation that had grown radioactive.
The “coup” framing is Mullenweg’s own. By calling it the fifth such attempt, he casts himself as the founder fighting off repeated challenges to his vision, and the board members as the latest in a line of people who tried and failed to take the company in a different direction. It is a narrative that plays well with the parts of the WordPress community that see him as the platform’s protector, and poorly with the parts that see him as the reason the platform keeps generating drama.
What the episode does not resolve is the underlying tension between Mullenweg’s personal control of WordPress and the broader community’s expectations. He has fought with hosting companies, with plugin developers and with parts of his own staff, and each conflict has tested the same question: whether one person should hold so much sway over software so many people depend on. The answer this week, at least inside the company, was yes.
Mullenweg’s grip on the company runs deeper than the title. He controls the open-source WordPress.org site and the foundation’s trademarks, which gives him leverage over the ecosystem even if he lost the corporate seat. That is why the board’s vote, while symbolically dramatic, may never have been enforceable in practice, and why the reversal happened so fast. The directors could remove him from the payroll; they could not remove him from WordPress.
The episode leaves Automattic with an unresolved question about who actually governs it. A board that tries to remove its founder and fails has spent its authority without changing anything, and the employees who watched the Slack channels empty and refill now have to decide whether the company they work for answers to a board or to one person.
The practical question is what happens to the board now. With Schneider reportedly out and the other directors who moved against Mullenweg left in an awkward position, the company’s governance is in flux. A board that tried and failed to remove its chief executive rarely functions normally afterward, and Automattic’s next chapter will be defined as much by who is left in the room as by who is running it.
