> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.”
This line is so perfectly on the nose it could be in a McSweeney's article and yet here it is in reality. We are truly on the weirdest timeline.
Many Burning Man guides, including the original arctic monkey guide that I first read about 20 years ago, specifically warn against making any life altering decisions for weeks after Burning Man.
Decompression is a bitch when coming down from half a dozen psychedelics.
I have seen way too many people in my surroundings go off their rockers after too many ayahuasca trips, especially if they do it in a short time frame, they get emotionally unregulated.
For me, it's a big task just decompressing from a "normal" fun weekend convention where I've done nothing more than light drinking.
I imagine decompressing from something like Burning Man would be even more intense... even without psychedelics.
(I know psychedelics are obviously a thing at Burning Man, but I don't know if it's 25% or 50% or 75% or 99.99% of people using them...)
As a side note, I know somebody who permanently changed their gender identity after a mushroom trip revelation. I've always wondered how long they waited after the trip to "finalize" their decision.
(FWIW, that was years ago and it seems like it was indeed the right choice for them)
I just came here to say that I tried setting Wordpress up for someone a couple weeks ago and the entire admin experience felt like someone designed it WHILE AT burning man.
> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.” This year’s festival ended on September 7.
HN needs to allow some html in comments so we can put ‘lmao’ in <blink> and <marquee> tags
Good riddance! His neurotic public harassment of anyone who is remotely aligned against him (cf. Tumblr moderation and AspirePress) is simply childish and leaves much to be desired.
His behaviour has shown him to be unfit to be a CEO.
Oh that's who Mullenweg is? I had a bit of an argument with him on one of the socials, I was making the argument that Zuck has very much jumped the shark but he seemed to be a big fan.
He didn't have particularly good arguments though, given the abject failure to create anything interesting since the original Facebook site (they've been making also-ran clones before buying the competition OR going into new markets and failing since the early 2010s).
Hopefully, WP will get better. At the moment, WP itself, its ecosystem, and community are such a cesspool. It should not be used for anything more than just basic blogging. Even then, there are better alternatives. Especially in this day and age, when an AI model can easily write you what you need. It can write you something better than the trash adware on the plugin/theme store.
After reading about his behavior over the past couple of years, I'm sad that it took this long. He has far too much hostility for the community to continue.
photomatt - if you're reading this, you deserve this.
You are seriously one of the worst leadersnof a company. You are so narcissistic and the damage you've done to the WordPress brand and community as a whole is going to take years to dig out of.
You are an embarrassment and you need to leave and never be heard from again.
Wordpress was an amazing piece of software. They could have a future in the AI era which has a similar issue in standardizing content managing platforms, but what a fumble. And over something with such a small moat as a hosting platform for businesses.
I read a lot of people saying so many things about Matt from the outside. As an Automattician for 9 years now, what I see from the inside is the best work environment I've ever been part of, and the best I've heard of compared to what colleagues describe at other big tech companies. Automattic is the most diverse and fair company I've seen, with an open and transparent culture.
He might not be perfect, but all of this was created under his leadership. That starts with a genuinely unique hiring process that lets the company find people who fit well, and it extends to the way he delegates to leaders below him so they can do their best, while still letting anyone, in any position, share their thoughts on anything. On top of that, there are all his contributions to open source, alongside the products and services under Automattic's umbrella.
I'm not sure what the intentions are behind the attacks on him, but I know from my experience that they aren't fair.
Matt is a very good person who has done a ton for open source, the internet, and the arts. As a founder, this type of board action would be incredibly emotionally difficult, especially given you've worked with these people for decades and built the company from nothing.
While you may disagree to his reactions to particular issues, I don't really understand rooting against him or the negativity against him personally — he is one of the last stalwarts against a corporate, big tech internet.
The situation is obviously more complex than any of us know, and I'd encourage everyone to be a bit more positive and supportive of a fellow founder and builder.
> The situation is obviously more complex than any of us know, and I'd encourage everyone to be a bit more positive and supportive of a fellow founder and builder.
What is your basis for this claim? His actions and behavior are publicly visible, and I can't even imagine a hidden context that would justify how he has acted.
Who uses WP outside of legacy installs? I used to love it 15 or so years ago for side hustle work, but over time it gained weight and vulnerabilities, whack-a-mole. Plug-ins were nice, but that <?php...> inlining wasn't. I don't hate PHP, the things were just clumsy and messy inside the loop and I wasn't smart enough. What's the replacement these days in case I need to set up something simple quickly? Not Square Space or Shopify, although those are good products imo.
I try not to waste my time on WordPress drama anymore, but it's sad reading his tweets from today and thinking how someone I used to respect for supposedly being kind and generous (or just good at writing well to get what he wants) has fallen so far.
Man, in a thread he links to his tweet from 2024 that mentions using disappearing messages on Signal which the WPEngine lawyers are now using against him.
So many people (including DannyBee, himself a lawyer) were telling him on HN how opposing counsel would be analyzing every post looking for any kind of angle to give them an edge, and it was very much in his best interest to step away from his computer. But, in reply he said his own lawyers said it was fine so no big deal...
I’ve been at Automattic since 2018. Reading this thread, I wanted to share a story.
In 2022, Matt supported me and my work on WordPress Playground [1]. Playground was in its early days and most people were still questioning whether it did anything useful. I got skepticism from peers, social media, even from my direct lead at the time. Not from Matt. He encouraged me, promoted Playground, created an environment where I could build a team around it, and encouraged us to always open-source more and more for the community. Since then, Playground has matured, grown in popularity, and sparked other great open-source work [2][3][4][5]. Now it’s 2026, and Playground helps a lot of people every day.
And that wouldn’t have happened without Matt.
No company is perfect. I’m just grateful to be part of one that values open-source so, so much. Automattic has been around 21 years now. It must have spent dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars on building free, open source software! And everything have changed so much during those 21 years: The industry, the VC landscape, the prices of hardware. Every incentive to go closed-source is there, and yet Automattic is still doubling down on open-source. I think that’s pretty amazing, and I’m grateful to Matt for staying true to those values.
Anyway, that's the story. Take care of yourselves, everyone!
Thanks for sharing your story. How do you feel about the more recent behavior, though - the WP engine lawsuit, the buyout, etc.? Does that align with the person you saw and knew back then?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 23.0 ms ] threadThis line is so perfectly on the nose it could be in a McSweeney's article and yet here it is in reality. We are truly on the weirdest timeline.
Decompression is a bitch when coming down from half a dozen psychedelics.
I imagine decompressing from something like Burning Man would be even more intense... even without psychedelics.
(I know psychedelics are obviously a thing at Burning Man, but I don't know if it's 25% or 50% or 75% or 99.99% of people using them...)
As a side note, I know somebody who permanently changed their gender identity after a mushroom trip revelation. I've always wondered how long they waited after the trip to "finalize" their decision.
(FWIW, that was years ago and it seems like it was indeed the right choice for them)
Hehe.
HN needs to allow some html in comments so we can put ‘lmao’ in <blink> and <marquee> tags
His behaviour has shown him to be unfit to be a CEO.
He didn't have particularly good arguments though, given the abject failure to create anything interesting since the original Facebook site (they've been making also-ran clones before buying the competition OR going into new markets and failing since the early 2010s).
You are seriously one of the worst leadersnof a company. You are so narcissistic and the damage you've done to the WordPress brand and community as a whole is going to take years to dig out of.
You are an embarrassment and you need to leave and never be heard from again.
He might not be perfect, but all of this was created under his leadership. That starts with a genuinely unique hiring process that lets the company find people who fit well, and it extends to the way he delegates to leaders below him so they can do their best, while still letting anyone, in any position, share their thoughts on anything. On top of that, there are all his contributions to open source, alongside the products and services under Automattic's umbrella.
I'm not sure what the intentions are behind the attacks on him, but I know from my experience that they aren't fair.
The entire saga is easily discoverable through an internet search. If you care to learn, you can read about it pretty easily.
While you may disagree to his reactions to particular issues, I don't really understand rooting against him or the negativity against him personally — he is one of the last stalwarts against a corporate, big tech internet.
The situation is obviously more complex than any of us know, and I'd encourage everyone to be a bit more positive and supportive of a fellow founder and builder.
What is your basis for this claim? His actions and behavior are publicly visible, and I can't even imagine a hidden context that would justify how he has acted.
Like everyone else in the world is an NPC whose perspective can be ignored or overruled by this one dude.
From a quick scan of his recent tweets, https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenwegs-messages-wen... might answer the "why now?" of this.
I try not to waste my time on WordPress drama anymore, but it's sad reading his tweets from today and thinking how someone I used to respect for supposedly being kind and generous (or just good at writing well to get what he wants) has fallen so far.
So many people (including DannyBee, himself a lawyer) were telling him on HN how opposing counsel would be analyzing every post looking for any kind of angle to give them an edge, and it was very much in his best interest to step away from his computer. But, in reply he said his own lawyers said it was fine so no big deal...
In 2022, Matt supported me and my work on WordPress Playground [1]. Playground was in its early days and most people were still questioning whether it did anything useful. I got skepticism from peers, social media, even from my direct lead at the time. Not from Matt. He encouraged me, promoted Playground, created an environment where I could build a team around it, and encouraged us to always open-source more and more for the community. Since then, Playground has matured, grown in popularity, and sparked other great open-source work [2][3][4][5]. Now it’s 2026, and Playground helps a lot of people every day.
And that wouldn’t have happened without Matt.
No company is perfect. I’m just grateful to be part of one that values open-source so, so much. Automattic has been around 21 years now. It must have spent dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars on building free, open source software! And everything have changed so much during those 21 years: The industry, the VC landscape, the prices of hardware. Every incentive to go closed-source is there, and yet Automattic is still doubling down on open-source. I think that’s pretty amazing, and I’m grateful to Matt for staying true to those values.
Anyway, that's the story. Take care of yourselves, everyone!
[1] https://wordpress.org/playground/ [2] https://wordpress.com/studio/ [3] https://github.com/WordPress/sqlite-database-integration [4] https://github.com/WordPress/php-toolkit/ [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378305