Maybe the headline should be edited. Right now, those who see only the headline are misled into believing that he has "returned as CEO," when evidence can only confirm that he is in control of the company's official communication channels.
So he was on a leave of absense, and now is no longer on such a leave? This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense, but they give no evidence of that in the article. I saw it suggested that he usually has wild ideas after returning from burning man, and the board wanted to insulate the company from the effects of that. That he's now back is evidence for a theory along those lines, and contradicts a theory that the board was trying to get rid of him. But I have no insight beyond that.
It does sound as if he has lost his grip on reality.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.”
And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.
I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.
Sounds like you've never worked for a CEO with "ideas." One time a CEO made the whole R&D team switch to "aspect oriented programming" because he had read a blog post. Another time we had to switch to C# because he had heard it wad better than Java.
I worked for a company with co-CEOs. The ideas CEO left and the company tanked. I think there's a right way to have an ideas CEO but maybe a balance helps keep them from switching everybody to C# on a whim. A CEO without ideas seems like a recipe for at best stagnation and at worse just fleecing the company of value and taking a golden parachute.
Matt is Automattic's CEO.... I see what you're doing... ;)
We/I want to build useful things. This is a distraction. I believe Automattic is a net benefit for the web and look forward to having more focus to continue delivering on that. Internally, were focused on that.
The additional reporting at [0] about his alleged behaviour in internal channels along with his public posts on social media really reinforces this feeling for me. Good luck to everyone in the blast radius.
We need to go back to a time when a CEO 'trolling' or acting like this would be career suicide. It seems like half of the biggest tech companies are run by people with the emotional and social intelligence of 3 years olds.
I’ve been around the WP crowd enough to know countless stories that prove mm is basically a manual case of narcissistic personality disorder.
The reality shifting, the constant blaming, the unsubstantiated claims… they could put his picture on the DSM5 definition of the disorder.
The problem with these personalities is that they are untreatable and tend to get way worse with power/money.
He is an utter and catastrophic disgrace to the whole wordpress community and the only hope is that he gets to be successfully ousted.
They are not necessarily untreatable but to be treatable they need to realize and admit they have an issue, which is unlikely and gets even less likely if they are financially successful.
Would be nice if Tesla, SpaceX, Cursor, former Twitter all rotted with their stock prices plunging to zero, but fElon fanpeople and the AI sheep still only posting on former Twitter will keep them afloat.
Seems like nobody is actually reading the TFA which is a shame because what the article describes is truly mind boggling:
>However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic
What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.
A lot of WordPress enterprise users will be upset after finding out that after paying $20-100k a month, Wordpress actually poaches their employees. Just inspect a Wordpress enterprise site's response to certain endpoints using cURL or Postman, it will actually tell you to apply for Automattic. I have been meaning to write about this for a very long time.
Eh I mean this is common default no? If you inspect element on many sites it links to the career page. Reddit, discord, etc.
Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching
News sites can be very large - so running on Wordpress.com infrastructure can cause such amount. With cloud storage (provided by WP), additional support etc.
Because they're not paying only for Wordpress-the-software, they're paying for scalability, maintenance, etc. $100k/mo is probably cheaper than a team of high-end WP experts.
Same reason a ton of us pay for AWS/GCloud/Azure instead of dealing with bare metal. (And I say this as someone running an edge fleet. If I didn't need to, I wouldn't.)
That doesn't sound like poaching to me? I mean, if it's a public endpoint, the person who finds it could be an independent contractor hired to work on the site, or a random person on the Internet probing the site for fun.
What you describe sounds more like a cleverly hidden ad. Google and others were famous for this during silicon valley's growth phase when you could get a job as a software engineer if you had heard of Java in passing and could fog a mirror.
Intent matters: a hiring campaign doesn't rise to the level of poaching unless there is some concerted effort to attract specific employees and/or talent from a specific company.
Finally, poaching is a perjorative term, but the practice of hiring another company's talent (even if they are a competitor) is not illegal or unethical. Companies SHOULD have to compete against each other for top talent.
All I know is Wordpress and Beeper, are any of their other products good? Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
SimpleNote is outstanding. I've gone through countless note apps over the years and this was the only one that stuck long term. Every other option was either too complex for what I needed, got enshittified, or needless UX churn broke my workflow to an unacceptable degree.
Woocommerce is everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Over four million stores.
About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.
Because it’s a plugin for WP you might not ever notice a store is Woocommerce until you get the store emails that people often don’t customise much.
It’s fully possible to run a simple Woocommerce store without giving anyone a cut beyond your payment provider’s normal cut.
It’s not too difficult to extend; custom payment gateways and order processing hooks, inbound APIs, GraphQL etc.
If you are judicious about your install — just run Woocommerce, WP, customise one of the core themes or a well-known good theme like WP-Start or an Anders Noren theme, use the Stripe or Paypal payment gateway —- it’s pretty solidly secure, too; you’ll get automatic updates.
It’s not the most fun thing to administer, but it’s not Magento at least.
Automattic’s acquisition of Woocommerce was a blessing; some of the more complex extensions to woocommerce are still paid addons, which is where they make their money (as well as payment gateway referral fees, which was a little-noticed part of the squabble with WP Engine, who modified woocommerce to change the referrer to point to them). Woothemes were unpredictable and at times rapacious.
I would like to stop using wordpress over time, but I don’t think there are many better small e-commerce offerings that offer that level of open-source control for people who need to run a modestly large store on a true shoestring.
> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.
Source? This source [0] puts Shopify 10x ahead of WooCommerce on GMV. That roughly matches my experience working in this space in 2022, though it's definitely possible our customers weren't representative of the market as a whole.
The link that you provided largely confirms what parent said: it puts WooCommerce ahead of Shopify in terms of store count, with a number (4.34M live stores) which is consistent to the one mentioned by parent ("over four million stores").
> They're close on number of installations.
2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
It's true that the link puts Shopify at roughly 10X in terms of GMV but parent did not claim otherwise.
I think any interpretation of this that would measure "a third of... shopping" by number of individual sites rather than dollar volume is disingenuous at best.
> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations
And as for this:
> 2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
No, I wouldn't. I think that's within the margin of error for the typical methodology of this kind of research. They're the same number.
You’re from the Matt “WordPress is 45% of websites” school of statistics. WooCommerce is nothing compared to Shopify, barely a blip, inconsequential. WooCommerce is “installed” on millions of websites but it processes perhaps 1% of the volume of Shopify.
WooCommerce isn’t bad, acquiring it was a good call for Automattic, but to put it in the same league as Shopify is pure fantasy.
As for cost control, I’m not sure why you think Shopify is more expensive. Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify is expensive because migrations are expensive but day to day running costs are pretty much equivalent.
I did write a mangled sentence and you are correct to object to it.
But you seem kind of angry abd have decided something about me, and are now cherrypicking things off the woocommerce site to try to make me look foolish.
Did I explicitly say “shopify is more expensive”, for one thing? You are putting those words in my mouth.
However. I just looked at the numbers. Shopify starts at £19 per month. I could set up a speculative woocommerce store on good hosting for about £40 per year.
Several of the people I have set up stores for over the years have had no certainty that they would make a sale for months and yet needed customisations in their setup that no hosted e-commerce company could offer in their cheap plans.
> Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
You said that WooCommerce is more widely deployed than Shopify. Yes, it is installed as a WordPress plugin on more websites than Shopify but that is completely meaningless when discussing whether WooCommerce is an "also-ran" compared to Shopify.
So, if your comment was intended only to explain that WooCommerce is a widely installed Shopify plugin, I apologize for suggesting you have something in common with Matt, but your comment read to me (and I guess everyone else) like you were saying WooCommerce isn't an also-ran and is an important product for online commerce. It isn't, in the context of business, it doesn't belong in the same conversation as Shopify or any other serious commerce business.
I see WooCommerce stores all the time. And embedded in really odd stuff, like behind member walls — companies selling spare parts for washing machines and hoovers, all of that stuff.
I will grant you that in the last year or two some pretty big stores (particularly in the media and music world) have migrated to Shopify (they have a tool for that).
I don't blame them for migrating away and it's not hard to see purely strategic reasons why they would. Like I said in my comment, I'd prefer not to be running WP at all. But a lot of the work I do is at the very small, very speculative end of things.
Here in the UK a lot of speculative stuff runs on very small budgets and I know loads of micro-stores using WP because it can be spun up in an afternoon and customised with very specific plugins as an experiment on £5 of VM hosting per month.
I once built a complete prototype of a multi-vendor, multi-supplier niche business fulfilment system on top of Stripe Connect. We were to be able to roll out full e-commerce stores that could be customised by specialists for each potential user, but routed orders and payments to suppliers through a bespoke system (and managed fulfilment messaging and approval both ways).
The answer was data flowing from a custom Woocommerce order metadata and payment gateway plugin and back into the stores to remotely update them from the fulfilment network. GraphQL both ways (WP-GraphQL is actually pretty great but it was early days then). Storefront installs managed via WP-CLI and API etc.
There is no practical alternative to Woocommerce for prototype stuff like this short of building your own storefront (we built the entire system expecting to do that eventually; Woocommerce was always our prototype and we expected to be managing GraphQL mappings to support other stores in the meantime.)
It never went live for money reasons but I am not sure if Automattic would ever have seen that as more than a single WP store deployment, because of how rollout was managed.
Likewise it's unclear to me if Automattic can even know how many WooCommerce stores are on WP Engine.
All I care about is my favourite podcast app, Pocket Casts, which Automattic bought in a dumpster fire a few years ago.
But even if I don't personally use WP, the fact that something like 25% of the web runs on software which this lunatic has this much control over, is problematic in itself.
Holy shit. You are, if anything, underselling the article.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.” Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.”
And like all well-run companies, it's not clear who the ceo is.
Right, but choosing to troll the company you own because the board fired you for repeatedly, extremely publicly "Having a normal one", looks a lot like a mental breakdown of some sort.
The whole fucking Valley has been out of their mind on prescription amphetamines for at least a decade. The most visible people like Matt and Elon and a few others have the most visible effects but breakdowns like this are happening hourly with less fanfare.
See if you can think of any other interesting historical events that happened when the whole leadership and rank and file were on prescription amphetamines.
Well, and good old cocaine of course. Never in my life have I been so often jacked up on coke as when I got dragged into a multi-day "retreat" involving executives from multiple SV companies.
I do wonder if they are actually on the same level as was used in WW2 (which is what I'm assuming you are referring to and the routine use (by both sides but especially the Axis side/Germany).
SV has always had it's weird outliers but they do seem more for want of a better word - manic lately and much less outliers.
There's a long tradition of amphetamine use within the British establishment, too. Most obviously, Anthony Eden's reliance on Drinamyl was responsible in large part for the spectacularly poor decision making which led to the Suez crisis.
People in power absolutely do have an incentive to over-medicate themselves, and I'd be shocked if that didn't extend to SV tech leaders.
I love that "over-medicate" language (really). I will add that to my list of "things that are classy when rich people do them".
I always forget how geeked out these folks probably are and so I appreciate the reminder here.
About two days a month of my time is spent handing out bubbles and points to folks to get them to better manage their habits (in addition to other street medicine stuff). Stimulant culture is very foreign to my own chemistry, but yeah, the idea that most of these folks are just gakd up all the time certainly lines up with my experiences debraiding hobo feet.
I'm similarly not personally familiar with ketamine, but i've been doing first aid at festivals this year and understanding that most of the folks running the stuff in the US are on some spectrum of chemical impairment has been very helpful.
I don't miss drinking, but it was helpful in understanding the mindset at least.
If folks are interested in an ivy league business education but can't afford the tuition and life changes, I suggest that they can learn much of what it's like to be around a bunch of folks with poor impulse control and who are on a bunch of stimulants by volunteering with their local street medic group. The aesthetics are different but the general decision making processes seem very similar to me.
I think the implication here is that these drugs while adding focus also alter other personality traits and can lead to dark places. Stopping amphetamines is regularly painted as a traumatic experience. Here's some examples:
- An old roommate of mine talking about the agressive mental state as side effects of her ADHD meds.
- Regular use in the military, likely providing some buffer for the remorse and trauma of taking life or losing comrades, or precluding moral objection to bombing the civilian target etc.
Well I am talking doctor proscribed doses here not abusive doses. It seems like an incredible stretch to say taking a moderate amount of Adderall is going to make you care less about bombing civilians. I have never heard of people being traumatized because they couldn’t get their adhd medicine renewed.
This whole thing seems like baseless fear-mongering against adhd meds because they are chemically similar to meth. If you can show me some actual strong evidence I would be willing to look at it. All I am seeing so far in this comment chain is some wild false equivalents between natzi’s meth use and prescription adhd meds along with vague claims of harm.
A quick search showed me Adderal reduces narcissitic traits and increases empathy (yay) and roughly the same search but for meth shows lower empathy and increases aggression. I'm sure there are vast differences in the compounds and the dosing size. There's also a gulf between science committed to "adderall is good" and science asking "why meth bad?" Maybe when cartels fund open science we'll have more balance!?!
I'd say this thread is groping for a reason C suite can trend towards being narcissistic or psychotic. I'm sure there's a lot of pressure, and having to make a decision to reduce staff, or build a technology that will make jobs across industries redundant, and the broad effects that has on people's lives could lead to a numbness to those branches of empathy. I've personally known people that moderate their state multiple times a day, stratigizing what street or pharmaceutical drug to take to help them get something done, or to chill out, or be trippy up down or sideways, and they have the bladder issues that go with some of those drug choices to boot. I've known some who take ketamine all day and make code that looks like art and runs like a dream. I don't endorse the method, but I've seen it entwined with logic and beauty!
Right it's more like open defiance of a board decision that the board hasn't yet decided how to respond to. And in the meantime we don't know if the statements about him being back are official or just him going rogue.
But apparently he's booted out the admins who would be able to do anything (from the slack at least) while stating to the public everything has been resolved. This is astonishing and I would argue at least as unhinged as the activity for which the board was removing him.
It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him).
> It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him).
So what happens when the courts get involved?
Because "he won, because we was the only one with the passwords," seems like a software engineer fantasy.
It's a true power struggle. As a software engineer I have actually fallen into the trap of thinking that because of the law or a contract something would happen. It is a softer power than I expected.
The board wants to make money, that's why they hold shares and positions. If Mullenweg has the power to destroy value, that will be powerful leverage over them. If his employees side with him, if he holds the accounts, they'll have to negotiate carefully.
Of course, you would need a lawyer to determine when this crosses from a civil dispute to a criminal dispute because at some point him using the keys when he's not authorized could be a crime and if they can get the cops involved that certainly changes the dynamic.
A big part in both stories is that the boards were unwilling to actually state what exactly the CEO did wrong or why they have lost confidence - be that professionalism or not wanting to deliver ammunition for lawfare - which perfectly sets up the CEO to position himself as a victim to the greed and power games of the shadowy board
> A big part in both stories is that the boards were unwilling to actually state what exactly the CEO did wrong or why they have lost confidence - be that professionalism or not wanting to deliver ammunition for lawfare - which perfectly sets up the CEO to position himself as a victim to the greed and power games of the shadowy board
Which is really insane when you think about it. The CEO reports to the board, and since when have companies regularly provided real reasons for termination (I understand they try to say as little as possible, because there's no upside for them)?
There are companies where the CEO reports to the board, and there are companies where the board exists to keep up appearances. We’re finding out in real time Automattic is the second kind.
This should discourage investors, since an unbridled CEO is bad for them in the long term. But it won’t, because nobody thinks long term anymore.
I think there’s a few big differences between OpenAI and Automattic:
On the “good for the board” side:
1. OpenAI from the POV of investors has both a pretty high p(massive returns) and a pretty high p(no returns). Even if they’re convinced AI is going to swallow the economy, that doesn’t mean OpenAI wins that.
2. The range in outcomes from a Matt-less Automattic are much less carried than for OpenAI. Replacing him isn’t going to sink the company but it’s also not going to have a massive increase in valuation. It’s purely a decision that he’s a risk factor with his behaviour.
3. I’m sure there’s many good staff members on Automattic, but the work they do is pretty standard and understood, so there’s fewer irreplaceable individuals if any of them quit in support of Matt.
4. Because OpenAI is relatively new and has had such high growth, there were both a lot of true believers among the staff that it had to be Altman, and people who had a significant portion of their net worth locked into yet untradable shares that did not want the boat rocked.
5. What openAI hopes to achieve in marketing and policy requires a figurehead and only Altman had mass recognition. Matt’s public awareness is much lower and Automattic’s need for a public facing figurehead is lower.
In the pro-Matt factors:
1. Altman did not have an outright majority of the shares, Matt does
2. He did somewhat prepare by doing waves of voluntary severance to get his internal opponents to leave
Though somewhat of a digression I'd just like to jump in so the world doesn't forget that OpenAI was not a company with a valuation at all, it was a charity for the public benefit and now in private hands, having been basically stolen by any reasonable definition of the word.
You’re not wrong, but I think the alternative future is sama loses control, goes and raises a quick $100M, and hires all the profit-motivated staff to make something that looks like today’s OpenAI.
Dario already showed there was an appetite for this.
Right. Much like the alternative future is that someone considering stealing a public museum could instead build a building, hire away the staff, and fill it with art he acquired, instead of stealing one that was created via charitable donations.
Late reply, but I think once you took away the profit motivated people and the money man, the “museum” would have been exactly that - a collection of antiquated artifacts. But I guess we’ll never know.
I’m not saying it was right or moral, just probably inevitable.
it seems like he likely can't just fire all the board members, as some seats may be contractually required to be held by his investors, as part of funding agreements
That depends on the bylaws and specific contractual director-designation rights they may or may not have. Ianal but if he really controls 84% of shareholder votes like he claimed, he should be able to alter the board composition legally. Probably enough to get him unfired
Something I find weird is that modern seals are mass-produced. There is no identification value, because anyone can trivially buy a seal that will make the exact impression of your seal.
(For personal seals. I don't know what company seals involve.)
The base is mass produced; and you are conflating 'vanity' stamps available as souvenirs with the registered official seals for banking and formal business. Anyone can trivially buy a stamp matching all the other toy stamps for that name, but are not official.
Official seals use uncommon font styles and are hand carved natural materials, such that each one has a unique microfeatures inherent to the wood, stone, or horn used, which develop unique wear and ink absorption characteristics.
These official seals are registered and become official for specific scopes of use; some are solely for banking and separate from the other uses like contracts and official filings: which prevents corporate partners and official channels from potentially exposing the banking seals.
The vanity type seals can be used for informal things like putting your name on homework or stamping a package delivery receipt for items of trivial value such as Amazon basics, but it is illegal to use mass produced stamps for official legal or banking.
At least in the Japanese context that I'm more familiar with, there's also levels to seals: you have (possibly mass produced) lower-value seals for low-value signatures, but you also have high value seals where an exact imprint is recorded with the government for high value signature verification, and physical possession of which is very carefully guarded.
I mean it's basically identical to a signature in terms of identification value, and, by the sounds of it, usage.
The only difference is that demonstrated in the described case, that the stamp is expected to be passed on to whomever is in authority, whereas we would never say "This CEO can't be ousted as he refused to relinquish his signature."
> I mean it's basically identical to a signature in terms of identification value, and, by the sounds of it, usage.I mean it's basically identical to a signature in terms of identification value, and, by the sounds of it, usage.
Usage, sure. It's a lot worse in terms of identification value; signatures can be forged, but signing seals look identical to each other by design. Nobody is going to produce an exact replica of your signature by accident, but with seals that's routine.
Or, in the words of my friend, 橡皮章的大小，字体都一样的 [rubber seals' size and font are all the same].
(I had asked her whether she had a seal herself. She confirmed that she has one, and sent me an image very similar to this: https://img1.baidu.com/it/u=3145542370,421755251&fm=253&fmt=... . But she noted that Chinese personal seals are more likely to be square than round.)
Probably better than a signature for the high end fancy ones given that mine never looks the same from one to the next, a stamp made of natural material is going to be more self-similar across impressions than my signature or most peoples I'd imagine.
Not to mention the god awful "sign here" on delivery tablets, I just make a random squiggle because it never works properly.
In absence of a good enforcement mechanism, it absolutely does apply. Is Slack going to strip Mullenweg of admin control in absence of court order, as long as the Slack bills are paid? It would set a terrible precedent for them to do so unilaterally. Whatever the legal process this battle follows, it will be a year or two before it's even possible for a final ruling + court order for the handover of Slack admin control to happen. That's de facto Slack control for at least a year or two.
If employees can be persuaded to move themselves + systems to a board controlled chat instance, that's an angle, but Mullenweg has stronger cards if he's liked by employees.
If the board can show they fired him and he's now accessing their systems without authorization, I don't think it's a civil matter, and criminal courts might move faster.
> It would set a terrible precedent for them to do so unilaterally.
Speaking generally, big SaaS have law enforcement desks that work on exactly this type of thing, and the "terrible precedent" is already widely set. Plenty of law enforcement outreach (which includes lawyers, courts, and actual law enforcement officials) results in pre-emptive compliance by the SaaS. I would be massively surprised if Slack has not already done this in many cases, because most huge companies routinely do.
That's neither generally good nor generally bad; whether it's the right move depends on the charge, requested actions by law enforcement, status of legal proceedings, and the values/diligence by which the SaaS business assesses the legitimacy and likely cost/benefit of a law enforcement request. Note that "pre-emptive compliance" doesn't always mean an email saying "hey, the FBI said you suck so we terminated your account". There's a broad spectrum of tools available to a SaaS ranging from sending that email, to holding bespoke contract re-negotiations (which are functionally always in process between a SaaS and a huge customer) hostage to endless redlining rounds, to enforcing ToS violations that the SaaS previously turned a blind eye towards due to customer size.
> Whatever the legal process this battle follows, it will be a year or two before it's even possible for a final ruling + court order
Preliminary injunctions can be issued in days to weeks, not months to years, in all sorts of civil and criminal cases in all sorts of jurisdictions. Those can take the form of "don't change stuff with your admin access" or "grant admin control to someone else"-type orders. In cases where a service administrator is materially involved, injunctions are also easy to get on the basis of evidence preservation.
That's a pretty sharp tool. Failure to comply with those opens individuals and businesses up to way more legal penalties and tighter timeframes. Even if an injunction is later vacated/dismissed/modified, the legal argument that you violated it because you knew that would happen is an extremely tough sell.
If he really did this, he's going to prison, but not for a few years. Defrauding shareholders is one of the worst things you can do, because it attacks the system directly.
... literally all of the SPAC mania was about circumventing regulation and defrauding shareholders in public markets. All of the SPACs are worth a fraction of what they were at listing. I don't see anyone being prosecuted.
Edit: I take that back, [1] this guy got prison time. Do Chamath next.
Up until recently (and my intervention) my work had multiple aws accounts tied to individual people, where they had inherited a personal account into the billing org.
There are also, in business use, some domains where an executive personally owns the registration but has delegated DNS into the company. There is no written agreement.
A former employer completely lost access to a couple of social media accounts (twitter/$company, etc) after laying off enough people.
That reminds me of the San Fco "network administrator" who would not provide the passwords to anyone in city gov't and brought things down to a standstill. Eventually he capitulated and provided the governor the passwords to their networks. Some people!
He also may simply be an outright majority shareholder himself (he said he owns 84% of the company in 2024) and able to easily and unilaterally replace the board.
I cannot read the article, thanks for summarizing.
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Agree… the article doesn’t make it clear that he’s really back, just that he has taken control of key company assets like the company Slack and is saying he’s back.
I don’t think this is over until the board releases a statement. CEOs can pontificate all they want but at the end of the day the board is legally in charge of and the final say at a company. 99.99% of the time it’s just the CEO saying everything and the board quietly giving their blessing out of view. This is the 0.01% where everyone actually wants the board to speak, loudly and clearly.
> he has taken control of key company assets like the company Slack and is saying he’s back
To be clear, Matt seems to have stolen Automattic's assets. That drops into several categories of shareholder lawsuit and potentially criminal behaviour.
> and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well,” a company spokesperson shared
Did anyone else think "what the fuck did I just read" after this sentence? Did Matt write it himself while posing as a "spokesperson"? This reads like that time Trump wrote in pseudonomyously to a newspaper about how amazing and perfect Trump was.
Oh, I should've kept reading. The article is a WTF did I just read.
I think most people aren't reading the article and are not appreciating how insane this story is. But you're right the whole thing I could barely believe what was happening there.
I can’t help but think that’s because they don’t know any better and maybe because they’re getting better informed by the reporting than what they’re actually getting from management.
The first meaningful internet presence he had was the whole WP engine debacle, which seemed to be a pretty ill-advised thing to do from a legal standpoint and also upset the open source community, who are rightly concerned about that sort of thing. Some of the actions taken then broke a number of small sites, upsetting those users. Overall, you've got a baseline reasonable number of pissed off hobbyists with internet presences.
Microsoft has had its controversies, but the reason the interest became personal here is it seems this was his own initiative (he kicked everything off with a public blog post).
And once again in this case, it looks like a bunch of chaotic behaviour centred on the individual more-so than standard "unpopular corporate decision making". That sort of thing has a big PR blast radius and has exposed him to criticism more than necessary (or normal).
Given how avoidable the above is (by simply operating through his lawyers / the organisation), it's feeding speculation on his mental state.
Matt was here on HN writing strange comments and undermining his own legal case despite people telling him to stop underming himself. That self destructive behavior is why people started to think he was having a mental health crisis.
And you seem to know way too much about this to be "not involved at all in WP".
I mean, both can be true at the same time. For a slightly controversial example, look at Kanye. If you knew him before he got off his rocker (especially the 2000s), he was a very different person than who he has become today.
1. He should probably go back on his bipolar medication, even if he feels less creative on it.
2. Paying for the surgery his mother died during really messed up his head. Partly because he probably blames himself, partly because she was one of the few stabilizing influences in his life. He really started going downhill after.
He might have always been impulsive-grandstanding-interrupt-Taylor-Swift Kanye, but it's conceivable he wouldn't have morphed into slavery-is-a-state-of-mind-"i-love-hitler"-antisemitic Kanye.
Sigh. "I miss the old Kanye." Time to give 808s and Heartbreak a re-listen.
It surprises me to no end that people continue working for this lunatic. When this company was offering an early severance, I am surprised only 159 took the offer [1]. Per cited article, this was 8.4% of the total workforce. Apparently there was even a second severance offer at around the same time of the CEO's legal fight with WP Engine [2].
This and previous submission about the Automattic board attempt to fire the founder should be used as a lesson that you should never ever give up control of your company to anyone.
Facebook is a good example on how to structure your company to keep control of it.
As fou der - yes. The question is if investors accept that gamble.
Facebook, when, Meta took a bunch of bad decisions in recentyears. All that Metaverse is just a write off ... for now the stock market liked the "vision" but that may end.
How willing investor's then are to play such a game is to be seen. I guess this only works in exceptional cases. Facebook was a money printing machine everybody wanted to be a part of.
And FB is a lesson to a lot of companies and the public not to allow the same dual class stock structure. Zuckerberg can cash out a lot of his equity and still be the controlling force behind FB even though other people "own" a majority stake of the stocks and equity.
If a founder is going to VCs or the markets in general for funding, there's no way to really do this. I don't see how the vast majority of founders can realistically expect others to fund their companies and still let the founder have the final say on all company matters.
If founders are willing to self-finance or finance based on cash-flow/collateral, that's a different story. But if you're selling majority stakes of your company's equity to others in order to finance your operations and growth, the equity owners should get a majority vote in how your company runs.
> I don't see how the vast majority of founders can realistically expect others to fund their companies and still let the founder have the final say on all company matters.
By not selling the controlling majority stake in their company, or retain super-voting rights. Anything to not give anyone the possibility to take their company from them.
Well, not selling controlling majority stake is fine. What people have issues with are the super-voting rights that where the people owning those rights get to play with other's money with the others not having much say on how that money gets used. E.g. look at meta's VR spending as an example.
The unhappy investors can sell their Meta shares and invest in something else if they don't like it, no? Now, since they are just unhappy but don't sell, it means Meta still makes money for them.
> This and previous submission about the Automattic board attempt to fire the founder should be used as a lesson that you should never ever give up control of your company to anyone.
I'm afraid in this case, this "should never" barely makes Mullenweg's top 10.
This is Automattic's third entry on HN's front page these days, and I'm happy to share a few thoughts. For context, I've been at Automattic for five years, and I've used WordPress since ~0.7 or similar.
I tried to join Automattic many years ago after seeing a "Who's Hiring?" here on HN; the company had about 70-80 people, and Matt himself replied to my email and said they didn't have enough space at the time. But later they contacted me again, and here I am, welcomed with a "so glad you're here now!" Slack message not written by a bot but from Matt himself.
I am proud to go around with my Automattic swag, telling people what WordPress is, the difference between .org and .com, what a database is, and, generally speaking, what a blog is.
Automattic isn't an IT-perfect company; WordPress isn't perfect either, and neither are PHP, MySQL, or whatever other technologies we use and others use in other completely different stacks.
Finding software faults (and bugs) is easy, and in GPL2 OSS you can fix them and share the results with us and the community. We use much more open code than people usually realize if you dig into our GIT/SVN accounts. Automattic sits on open code, and you can use it however you want. You don't need to pay for it.
I hope someone eventually does a deep-dive on the organizational structure of WordPress and how much of a mess it is.
As someone that’s pretty much worked in/with WP for my entire career, it’s always seemed like the worst of both worlds - distributed and slow-moving, yet still ultimately controlled to a massive extent by a single individual.
These kinds of absurd situations just slowly push people toward Shopify, other CMSes, etc. There will be no grand exodus, because too many companies are intertwined to the WP ecosystem. But combined with AI, the horrible design of Gutenberg, and half a dozen other things, I really worry for the future of WP. At this point I generally only recommend it to people that need something extremely customized. Other platforms are easier to use and don’t have the soap opera drama.
Shopify is a public company and thus subject to far more regulations and expected behavior of the CEO.
I also specifically did not merely say that being controlled by one person was bad, but that it was bad in the context of also being slow at decision making. In many cases having a single decision maker is a must for being dynamic.
Regulations maybe, but CEO expectations? Doesn't seem to be happening.
Shopify's CEO was in the news just recently for arguing that rich people should be able to cast more votes. That's the most naked anti-democracy stance I've heard in ages.
(And this is before we get into funding "deport-the-foreigners-and-minorities" DHH's Omarchy.)
Or just don't use these hacky solutions and just make a gd ecom website. It's 2026, use claude if you have too. There is no reason for shopify to exist (or wordpress for that matter, but at least wordpress isn't for profit). They say AI should kill SaaS, but it should actually kill all these dumb abstraction PaaS.
I say this as someone who has recently helped a few friends move their ecom stores off shopify, and wow, I didn't know such a horrible paradigm could exist. I genuinely think it would be easier for someone to learn a web stack in 2026 than learn to piece together whatever spaghetti monster shopify, and similar hacks are.
From an outsiders perspective, Matt's claims of comment sections like this one being heavily astroturfed do sound somewhat credible.
Every single one of them I saw so far has the same bad faith attacks, claiming that that guy's mental health would be compromised - and then nothing else other than implying that corporate processes are correct and you are to shut up.
Are there real people with opinions about this?
I'd like to hear them.
It's because his behavior pattern is instantly recognizable as what happens when people get out of control on prescription stimulants and since those are an epidemic in the field at this point most people have seen it and know the trajectory and find it utterly exhausting.
I wouldn't rule out that it might also be that, though, this too sounds like "he's mentally ill" but phrased differently.
I honestly do not see what you're saying there, but I also have no people in my life that would be using prescription stimulants. So it's not impossible that I have an experience gap there.
Specificially in Silicon Valley, maybe a third of the people I know on stimulants have seen a doctor in person about it in the last year.
Most are getting prescriptions from online shops where the doctor evaluating one changes every visit. Many don't have a prescription at all. I'm going out on the world's sturdiest limb here and guessing Matt, coming back from burning man, wasn't taking solely prescription drugs for which he has a prescription.
> Every single one of them I saw so far has the same bad faith attacks, claiming that that guy's mental health would be compromised…
That's because the substantive discussion happened in 2024 when this whole mess started. He was commenting here - which resulted in screenshots showing up in federal court filings - in deeply unwise fashion.
If you're coming to this late you may be missing the history, which is that Wordpress seemed to abuse every power at its disposal to force a third party company out of its ecosystem unless they "paid up", a demand associated with no formal process or agreement or contract of any kind which brought avalanches of negative press and a lawsuit to Wordpress.
In the aftermath of that news, he personally wrote blog posts and participated in comment sections, getting deep into the weeds of arguments and going into personal attacks in ways that seemed unflatteringly blow back on him. And seemingly neutral third parties watching these events have found his actions hard to justify and he seems to have alienated a lot of the Wordpress ecosystem (though by no means all and it's hard to quantify that kind of thing).
And here, if you read the article (and if the article is basically right in its details), he seems to be outrightly defying a decision of his own board in a brazen power play. I don't think unhinged is a controversial characterization of his choices both to flex power and get into personal attacks leading up to this point, and this seems like yet another entry.
So try looking at the face value of the events being reported before treating the reaction like it must be astroturfing. If you don't read about it, you won't have the context to know what the comments are reacting to.
> he seems to be outrightly defying a decision of his own board in a brazen power play.
There are a lot of people in this comment section repeating this as if it was an act of heresy, but I kinda do not see why one would do that?
I'd like to see terms like "unhinged" to stay reserved for non-made-up structures. Stuff where someone genuinely harms other people and not just their financial wants/needs/etc.
The board itself of course wants people to believe that it has power and not following its orders is wrong, but that's just.. their opinion. And they rely on someone actually believing that.
It is genuinely weird to me to keep reading this, because it's normal people defending how power structures in which they are not winning work. Why would one do that? What do you care if a board is respected?
I kinda get the general desire for "order" thing and all, but boards - generally speaking - do not get there through merit or a democratic mandate, nor do they act in the interest of normal people, so.. why care if he pisses his board off?
Care to the degree that is being cared here, I mean.
Should he be doing this? Probably not.
But the immediate "victim" of it is most likely just a group of people with equally deep pockets doing exactly the same kind of brazen power play. I don't see why that would get strong emotions out of normal workers.
Unless of course it's not them at all. Hence that suspicion.
__
I've consulted the LLM about this, and while doing so, I've remembered that Boards usually are full of VCs, and YC is VC, so.
Yeah, I can see why not respecting the board would be seen as heresy here. Weird how all the money in the world cannot buy one everything, huh?
I would recommend working on control over your attention. You've gone from saying negative reaction was "heavily astroturfed" to acknowledging he should not be doing this and you've gone from that to drifting into first impression shower thoughts about how boards work, apparently learning about the facts your commenting on for the first time every step of the way.
I think I can tell from how you're talking about boards that you're underestimating how many there are, how varied they are (non profits, community theaters, land trusts, boring but non-scandalous corporate governance) and how diverse their cultures and missions can be. And we don't need vague shower thoughts about how you think "most" boards work when there's a lot of reported detail about the Wordpress drama that sets the context for their operating conditions with a lot more specificity than your guesstimations.
It should be enough to note that the details coming straight out of the reporting are inflammatory enough to the average person that it can explain why there's a negative reaction against Mullenweg without having to assume it was astroturfed, which was the point you were originally making.
I can't help but read this and be reminded of what Steve Albini said about refusing a major label contract with Big Black:
> If you don't use contracts, you don't have any contracts to worry about. If you don't have a tour rider, you don't have a tour rider to argue about. If you don't have a booking agent, you don't have a booking agent to argue with.
> To us, every moment we remained unfettered and in control was a success. We never had a manager. We never had a booking agent. We never had a lawyer. We never took an advance from a record company. We booked our own tours, paid our own bills, made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences. The results of that methodology speak for themselves: Nobody ever told us what to do, and nobody took any of our money.
If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.
He also didn't make a living, and record companies took his style and used it to generate billions. His income came from his studio, production work, and being a celebrity.
I was just having a discussion about this with a friend who watched an NYU hosted debate in the 90s between the guy I can't remember from Sick Of It All and Sam McPheeters from Born Against. Born Against had been trolling Sick Of It All for ages (because it was fun), putting up posters, passing out fliers around their shows and talking about them for signing to a major label and distributor, and especially for censoring their lyric sheet in order to get sold at Walmart. Born Against was traditional DIY, on Sam's record label (Vermiform), didn't have bar codes on their records, mostly mailorder, etc.
Both were right, McPheeters was right that Sick Of It All had sold out and censored themselves in order to fit into corporate commerce, but the guy from Sick Of It All was more right. His position was that Born Against (like a Steve Albini) were rich middle class kids who were just having fun, and Sick Of It All were from working class families that they had to support. Music can be the most important thing for hobbyists, but that kind of music is just music. They on the other hand were looking for a ticket to a better life, and one that allowed them to do what they were good at and what they enjoyed.
So Born Against and their style ended up aped by the corporations, and spreads into emocore and all that shit, makes the companies billions, and Sam McPheeters ends up with zero of that. He's fine, he's writing columns for the Atlantic and doing interviews with NPR (incidentally because wealthy people pay to be close to "cool" people.) Meanwhile the style of music represented by Sick Of It All pretty much runs its course, but the members pocket a bunch of cash, and get to move on to do whatever else they want.
Purity is a privilege of the already wealthy. A lot of people chose Wordpress because it was the cheapest functional option (Free.) They were not interested in writing their own CMS, and couldn't afford to anyway.
> If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.
Also in respect to Mullenweg, afaik he owns 84% of the company. This never had a chance without his consent.
> Also in respect to Mullenweg, afaik he owns 84% of the company. This never had a chance without his consent.
He has proxy agreements with Automattic's investors for 84% of the vote. I don't know how they're structured, but I saw from other discussions that they may be irrevocable.
242 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadMatt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 - Sept 2026 (144 comments)
Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283 - Sept 2026 (372 comments)
(I know there have been many other threads in this long saga but I don't have the time (or the stomach) to try to list them)
Way more are than we are told about.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.”
And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.
Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat?
Not beyond the realms of possibility then
There is a Thunderdome at Burning Man.
https://journal.burningman.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Th...
I think it said that Mullenweg always came back from burning man with lots of ideas.
The implication to me was the ideas were terrible and the board was afraid of having to deal with it yet again. But that’s a total guess.
Trust me, you don't want a CEO with "ideas."
I agree no ideas is just a path towards irrelevance.
Matt is always looking for inspiration, as we all should be. Whether it comes from Burning man or elsewhere seems irrelevant.
We/I want to build useful things. This is a distraction. I believe Automattic is a net benefit for the web and look forward to having more focus to continue delivering on that. Internally, were focused on that.
[0] https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-swears-for-th...
>However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic
What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.
Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching
Same reason a ton of us pay for AWS/GCloud/Azure instead of dealing with bare metal. (And I say this as someone running an edge fleet. If I didn't need to, I wouldn't.)
What you describe sounds more like a cleverly hidden ad. Google and others were famous for this during silicon valley's growth phase when you could get a job as a software engineer if you had heard of Java in passing and could fog a mirror.
Intent matters: a hiring campaign doesn't rise to the level of poaching unless there is some concerted effort to attract specific employees and/or talent from a specific company.
Finally, poaching is a perjorative term, but the practice of hiring another company's talent (even if they are a competitor) is not illegal or unethical. Companies SHOULD have to compete against each other for top talent.
A more optimistic, less chaotic and exasperating time.
About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.
Because it’s a plugin for WP you might not ever notice a store is Woocommerce until you get the store emails that people often don’t customise much.
It’s fully possible to run a simple Woocommerce store without giving anyone a cut beyond your payment provider’s normal cut.
It’s not too difficult to extend; custom payment gateways and order processing hooks, inbound APIs, GraphQL etc.
If you are judicious about your install — just run Woocommerce, WP, customise one of the core themes or a well-known good theme like WP-Start or an Anders Noren theme, use the Stripe or Paypal payment gateway —- it’s pretty solidly secure, too; you’ll get automatic updates.
It’s not the most fun thing to administer, but it’s not Magento at least.
Automattic’s acquisition of Woocommerce was a blessing; some of the more complex extensions to woocommerce are still paid addons, which is where they make their money (as well as payment gateway referral fees, which was a little-noticed part of the squabble with WP Engine, who modified woocommerce to change the referrer to point to them). Woothemes were unpredictable and at times rapacious.
I would like to stop using wordpress over time, but I don’t think there are many better small e-commerce offerings that offer that level of open-source control for people who need to run a modestly large store on a true shoestring.
Source? This source [0] puts Shopify 10x ahead of WooCommerce on GMV. That roughly matches my experience working in this space in 2022, though it's definitely possible our customers weren't representative of the market as a whole.
[0] https://www.sanjaydey.com/shopify-vs-woocommerce-why-brands-...
> They're close on number of installations.
2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
It's true that the link puts Shopify at roughly 10X in terms of GMV but parent did not claim otherwise.
> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations
And as for this:
> 2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
No, I wouldn't. I think that's within the margin of error for the typical methodology of this kind of research. They're the same number.
I did clearly write a mangled sentence, after midnight. It’s wrongly constructed, you are right to say so.
WooCommerce isn’t bad, acquiring it was a good call for Automattic, but to put it in the same league as Shopify is pure fantasy.
As for cost control, I’m not sure why you think Shopify is more expensive. Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify is expensive because migrations are expensive but day to day running costs are pretty much equivalent.
https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/WooCommerce-Checkou...
https://trends.builtwith.com/shop
I did write a mangled sentence and you are correct to object to it.
But you seem kind of angry abd have decided something about me, and are now cherrypicking things off the woocommerce site to try to make me look foolish.
Did I explicitly say “shopify is more expensive”, for one thing? You are putting those words in my mouth.
However. I just looked at the numbers. Shopify starts at £19 per month. I could set up a speculative woocommerce store on good hosting for about £40 per year.
Several of the people I have set up stores for over the years have had no certainty that they would make a sale for months and yet needed customisations in their setup that no hosted e-commerce company could offer in their cheap plans.
> Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
You said that WooCommerce is more widely deployed than Shopify. Yes, it is installed as a WordPress plugin on more websites than Shopify but that is completely meaningless when discussing whether WooCommerce is an "also-ran" compared to Shopify.
So, if your comment was intended only to explain that WooCommerce is a widely installed Shopify plugin, I apologize for suggesting you have something in common with Matt, but your comment read to me (and I guess everyone else) like you were saying WooCommerce isn't an also-ran and is an important product for online commerce. It isn't, in the context of business, it doesn't belong in the same conversation as Shopify or any other serious commerce business.
I will grant you that in the last year or two some pretty big stores (particularly in the media and music world) have migrated to Shopify (they have a tool for that).
I don't blame them for migrating away and it's not hard to see purely strategic reasons why they would. Like I said in my comment, I'd prefer not to be running WP at all. But a lot of the work I do is at the very small, very speculative end of things.
Here in the UK a lot of speculative stuff runs on very small budgets and I know loads of micro-stores using WP because it can be spun up in an afternoon and customised with very specific plugins as an experiment on £5 of VM hosting per month.
I once built a complete prototype of a multi-vendor, multi-supplier niche business fulfilment system on top of Stripe Connect. We were to be able to roll out full e-commerce stores that could be customised by specialists for each potential user, but routed orders and payments to suppliers through a bespoke system (and managed fulfilment messaging and approval both ways).
The answer was data flowing from a custom Woocommerce order metadata and payment gateway plugin and back into the stores to remotely update them from the fulfilment network. GraphQL both ways (WP-GraphQL is actually pretty great but it was early days then). Storefront installs managed via WP-CLI and API etc.
There is no practical alternative to Woocommerce for prototype stuff like this short of building your own storefront (we built the entire system expecting to do that eventually; Woocommerce was always our prototype and we expected to be managing GraphQL mappings to support other stores in the meantime.)
It never went live for money reasons but I am not sure if Automattic would ever have seen that as more than a single WP store deployment, because of how rollout was managed.
Likewise it's unclear to me if Automattic can even know how many WooCommerce stores are on WP Engine.
But even if I don't personally use WP, the fact that something like 25% of the web runs on software which this lunatic has this much control over, is problematic in itself.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.” Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.”
And like all well-run companies, it's not clear who the ceo is.
See if you can think of any other interesting historical events that happened when the whole leadership and rank and file were on prescription amphetamines.
SV has always had it's weird outliers but they do seem more for want of a better word - manic lately and much less outliers.
People in power absolutely do have an incentive to over-medicate themselves, and I'd be shocked if that didn't extend to SV tech leaders.
I always forget how geeked out these folks probably are and so I appreciate the reminder here.
About two days a month of my time is spent handing out bubbles and points to folks to get them to better manage their habits (in addition to other street medicine stuff). Stimulant culture is very foreign to my own chemistry, but yeah, the idea that most of these folks are just gakd up all the time certainly lines up with my experiences debraiding hobo feet.
I'm similarly not personally familiar with ketamine, but i've been doing first aid at festivals this year and understanding that most of the folks running the stuff in the US are on some spectrum of chemical impairment has been very helpful.
I don't miss drinking, but it was helpful in understanding the mindset at least.
If folks are interested in an ivy league business education but can't afford the tuition and life changes, I suggest that they can learn much of what it's like to be around a bunch of folks with poor impulse control and who are on a bunch of stimulants by volunteering with their local street medic group. The aesthetics are different but the general decision making processes seem very similar to me.
If you are poor and mentally ill, you are crazy, if you are rich you are eccentric.
If you are poor and a felon you can't vote, if you are rich and a felon you can win the presidency.
It very much is a two tier system and guess what, statistically if you are reading this you aren't in that fortunate tier.
From the eyes of a Musk or an Altman none of us matter and there isn't much difference between us and someone on the street using drugs.
Stuff like that, channeled into being the CEO.
This whole thing seems like baseless fear-mongering against adhd meds because they are chemically similar to meth. If you can show me some actual strong evidence I would be willing to look at it. All I am seeing so far in this comment chain is some wild false equivalents between natzi’s meth use and prescription adhd meds along with vague claims of harm.
But apparently he's booted out the admins who would be able to do anything (from the slack at least) while stating to the public everything has been resolved. This is astonishing and I would argue at least as unhinged as the activity for which the board was removing him.
So what happens when the courts get involved?
Because "he won, because we was the only one with the passwords," seems like a software engineer fantasy.
The board wants to make money, that's why they hold shares and positions. If Mullenweg has the power to destroy value, that will be powerful leverage over them. If his employees side with him, if he holds the accounts, they'll have to negotiate carefully.
Of course, you would need a lawyer to determine when this crosses from a civil dispute to a criminal dispute because at some point him using the keys when he's not authorized could be a crime and if they can get the cops involved that certainly changes the dynamic.
They're almost certainly going to get sued by minority shareholders over this.
Didn't a Board member resign today?
Which is really insane when you think about it. The CEO reports to the board, and since when have companies regularly provided real reasons for termination (I understand they try to say as little as possible, because there's no upside for them)?
This should discourage investors, since an unbridled CEO is bad for them in the long term. But it won’t, because nobody thinks long term anymore.
Did OpenAI have a corporate board try to fire Sam? Or a non-profit board?
Between a corporate board with a fiduciary obligation to its shareholders and a non-profit board with more-ambiguous responsibilities.
Also, Sam didn't pretend to be CEO after he was fired. He rallied to undo the decision.
On the “good for the board” side:
1. OpenAI from the POV of investors has both a pretty high p(massive returns) and a pretty high p(no returns). Even if they’re convinced AI is going to swallow the economy, that doesn’t mean OpenAI wins that.
2. The range in outcomes from a Matt-less Automattic are much less carried than for OpenAI. Replacing him isn’t going to sink the company but it’s also not going to have a massive increase in valuation. It’s purely a decision that he’s a risk factor with his behaviour.
3. I’m sure there’s many good staff members on Automattic, but the work they do is pretty standard and understood, so there’s fewer irreplaceable individuals if any of them quit in support of Matt.
4. Because OpenAI is relatively new and has had such high growth, there were both a lot of true believers among the staff that it had to be Altman, and people who had a significant portion of their net worth locked into yet untradable shares that did not want the boat rocked.
5. What openAI hopes to achieve in marketing and policy requires a figurehead and only Altman had mass recognition. Matt’s public awareness is much lower and Automattic’s need for a public facing figurehead is lower.
In the pro-Matt factors:
1. Altman did not have an outright majority of the shares, Matt does
2. He did somewhat prepare by doing waves of voluntary severance to get his internal opponents to leave
Dario already showed there was an appetite for this.
I’m not saying it was right or moral, just probably inevitable.
That changes everything, he can just fire the board members, he's the actual boss (as shareholder) even when he's also their employee (as CEO).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seals_in_the_Sinosphere
(For personal seals. I don't know what company seals involve.)
Official seals use uncommon font styles and are hand carved natural materials, such that each one has a unique microfeatures inherent to the wood, stone, or horn used, which develop unique wear and ink absorption characteristics.
These official seals are registered and become official for specific scopes of use; some are solely for banking and separate from the other uses like contracts and official filings: which prevents corporate partners and official channels from potentially exposing the banking seals.
The vanity type seals can be used for informal things like putting your name on homework or stamping a package delivery receipt for items of trivial value such as Amazon basics, but it is illegal to use mass produced stamps for official legal or banking.
Given your username, I have to say I'm curious why that is.
The only difference is that demonstrated in the described case, that the stamp is expected to be passed on to whomever is in authority, whereas we would never say "This CEO can't be ousted as he refused to relinquish his signature."
Usage, sure. It's a lot worse in terms of identification value; signatures can be forged, but signing seals look identical to each other by design. Nobody is going to produce an exact replica of your signature by accident, but with seals that's routine.
Or, in the words of my friend, 橡皮章的大小，字体都一样的 [rubber seals' size and font are all the same].
(I had asked her whether she had a seal herself. She confirmed that she has one, and sent me an image very similar to this: https://img1.baidu.com/it/u=3145542370,421755251&fm=253&fmt=... . But she noted that Chinese personal seals are more likely to be square than round.)
Not to mention the god awful "sign here" on delivery tablets, I just make a random squiggle because it never works properly.
If employees can be persuaded to move themselves + systems to a board controlled chat instance, that's an angle, but Mullenweg has stronger cards if he's liked by employees.
Speaking generally, big SaaS have law enforcement desks that work on exactly this type of thing, and the "terrible precedent" is already widely set. Plenty of law enforcement outreach (which includes lawyers, courts, and actual law enforcement officials) results in pre-emptive compliance by the SaaS. I would be massively surprised if Slack has not already done this in many cases, because most huge companies routinely do.
That's neither generally good nor generally bad; whether it's the right move depends on the charge, requested actions by law enforcement, status of legal proceedings, and the values/diligence by which the SaaS business assesses the legitimacy and likely cost/benefit of a law enforcement request. Note that "pre-emptive compliance" doesn't always mean an email saying "hey, the FBI said you suck so we terminated your account". There's a broad spectrum of tools available to a SaaS ranging from sending that email, to holding bespoke contract re-negotiations (which are functionally always in process between a SaaS and a huge customer) hostage to endless redlining rounds, to enforcing ToS violations that the SaaS previously turned a blind eye towards due to customer size.
> Whatever the legal process this battle follows, it will be a year or two before it's even possible for a final ruling + court order
Preliminary injunctions can be issued in days to weeks, not months to years, in all sorts of civil and criminal cases in all sorts of jurisdictions. Those can take the form of "don't change stuff with your admin access" or "grant admin control to someone else"-type orders. In cases where a service administrator is materially involved, injunctions are also easy to get on the basis of evidence preservation.
That's a pretty sharp tool. Failure to comply with those opens individuals and businesses up to way more legal penalties and tighter timeframes. Even if an injunction is later vacated/dismissed/modified, the legal argument that you violated it because you knew that would happen is an extremely tough sell.
Edit: I take that back, [1] this guy got prison time. Do Chamath next.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-ceo-special-purp...
Up until recently (and my intervention) my work had multiple aws accounts tied to individual people, where they had inherited a personal account into the billing org.
There are also, in business use, some domains where an executive personally owns the registration but has delegated DNS into the company. There is no written agreement.
A former employer completely lost access to a couple of social media accounts (twitter/$company, etc) after laying off enough people.
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Yeah, not a chance I disable an adblocker for TechCrunch slop reporting
I don’t think this is over until the board releases a statement. CEOs can pontificate all they want but at the end of the day the board is legally in charge of and the final say at a company. 99.99% of the time it’s just the CEO saying everything and the board quietly giving their blessing out of view. This is the 0.01% where everyone actually wants the board to speak, loudly and clearly.
To be clear, Matt seems to have stolen Automattic's assets. That drops into several categories of shareholder lawsuit and potentially criminal behaviour.
The board of the parent ARM company fired him. He just kept going like the China unit was his company.
I don’t know how that ended.
https://www.nme.com/news/arm-china-finally-ousts-rogue-ceo-t...
If you cannot escalate a governance issue to a higher power, the controls are not worth the paper they are written on.
Similar to a government coup where you need to control the money and the military.
Did anyone else think "what the fuck did I just read" after this sentence? Did Matt write it himself while posing as a "spokesperson"? This reads like that time Trump wrote in pseudonomyously to a newspaper about how amazing and perfect Trump was.
Oh, I should've kept reading. The article is a WTF did I just read.
If you look up their career histories on LinkedIn, some of them are rising pretty quickly within the Automattic ranks.
Which would be terrible if true.
That's an oddly specific thing to clarify upfront.
Microsoft has had its controversies, but the reason the interest became personal here is it seems this was his own initiative (he kicked everything off with a public blog post).
And once again in this case, it looks like a bunch of chaotic behaviour centred on the individual more-so than standard "unpopular corporate decision making". That sort of thing has a big PR blast radius and has exposed him to criticism more than necessary (or normal).
Given how avoidable the above is (by simply operating through his lawyers / the organisation), it's feeding speculation on his mental state.
And you seem to know way too much about this to be "not involved at all in WP".
1. He should probably go back on his bipolar medication, even if he feels less creative on it. 2. Paying for the surgery his mother died during really messed up his head. Partly because he probably blames himself, partly because she was one of the few stabilizing influences in his life. He really started going downhill after.
He might have always been impulsive-grandstanding-interrupt-Taylor-Swift Kanye, but it's conceivable he wouldn't have morphed into slavery-is-a-state-of-mind-"i-love-hitler"-antisemitic Kanye.
Sigh. "I miss the old Kanye." Time to give 808s and Heartbreak a re-listen.
Or coming down from amphetamines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_for_the_People
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/159-employees-are-leaving-...
[2] https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-ma...
Facebook is a good example on how to structure your company to keep control of it.
Facebook, when, Meta took a bunch of bad decisions in recentyears. All that Metaverse is just a write off ... for now the stock market liked the "vision" but that may end.
How willing investor's then are to play such a game is to be seen. I guess this only works in exceptional cases. Facebook was a money printing machine everybody wanted to be a part of.
Ya there's a lot of lessons we can take away from Facebook. Most are not positive lessons, mind you.
If founders are willing to self-finance or finance based on cash-flow/collateral, that's a different story. But if you're selling majority stakes of your company's equity to others in order to finance your operations and growth, the equity owners should get a majority vote in how your company runs.
By not selling the controlling majority stake in their company, or retain super-voting rights. Anything to not give anyone the possibility to take their company from them.
I'm afraid in this case, this "should never" barely makes Mullenweg's top 10.
I tried to join Automattic many years ago after seeing a "Who's Hiring?" here on HN; the company had about 70-80 people, and Matt himself replied to my email and said they didn't have enough space at the time. But later they contacted me again, and here I am, welcomed with a "so glad you're here now!" Slack message not written by a bot but from Matt himself.
I am proud to go around with my Automattic swag, telling people what WordPress is, the difference between .org and .com, what a database is, and, generally speaking, what a blog is.
Automattic isn't an IT-perfect company; WordPress isn't perfect either, and neither are PHP, MySQL, or whatever other technologies we use and others use in other completely different stacks.
Finding software faults (and bugs) is easy, and in GPL2 OSS you can fix them and share the results with us and the community. We use much more open code than people usually realize if you dig into our GIT/SVN accounts. Automattic sits on open code, and you can use it however you want. You don't need to pay for it.
@zaerl
As someone that’s pretty much worked in/with WP for my entire career, it’s always seemed like the worst of both worlds - distributed and slow-moving, yet still ultimately controlled to a massive extent by a single individual.
These kinds of absurd situations just slowly push people toward Shopify, other CMSes, etc. There will be no grand exodus, because too many companies are intertwined to the WP ecosystem. But combined with AI, the horrible design of Gutenberg, and half a dozen other things, I really worry for the future of WP. At this point I generally only recommend it to people that need something extremely customized. Other platforms are easier to use and don’t have the soap opera drama.
I also specifically did not merely say that being controlled by one person was bad, but that it was bad in the context of also being slow at decision making. In many cases having a single decision maker is a must for being dynamic.
Haven’t heard of Solidus, but I’ll check it out.
Shopify's CEO was in the news just recently for arguing that rich people should be able to cast more votes. That's the most naked anti-democracy stance I've heard in ages.
(And this is before we get into funding "deport-the-foreigners-and-minorities" DHH's Omarchy.)
I say this as someone who has recently helped a few friends move their ecom stores off shopify, and wow, I didn't know such a horrible paradigm could exist. I genuinely think it would be easier for someone to learn a web stack in 2026 than learn to piece together whatever spaghetti monster shopify, and similar hacks are.
Every single one of them I saw so far has the same bad faith attacks, claiming that that guy's mental health would be compromised - and then nothing else other than implying that corporate processes are correct and you are to shut up.
Are there real people with opinions about this? I'd like to hear them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_stalking
I honestly do not see what you're saying there, but I also have no people in my life that would be using prescription stimulants. So it's not impossible that I have an experience gap there.
Specificially in Silicon Valley, maybe a third of the people I know on stimulants have seen a doctor in person about it in the last year.
Most are getting prescriptions from online shops where the doctor evaluating one changes every visit. Many don't have a prescription at all. I'm going out on the world's sturdiest limb here and guessing Matt, coming back from burning man, wasn't taking solely prescription drugs for which he has a prescription.
That's because the substantive discussion happened in 2024 when this whole mess started. He was commenting here - which resulted in screenshots showing up in federal court filings - in deeply unwise fashion.
It's just sad now.
In the aftermath of that news, he personally wrote blog posts and participated in comment sections, getting deep into the weeds of arguments and going into personal attacks in ways that seemed unflatteringly blow back on him. And seemingly neutral third parties watching these events have found his actions hard to justify and he seems to have alienated a lot of the Wordpress ecosystem (though by no means all and it's hard to quantify that kind of thing).
And here, if you read the article (and if the article is basically right in its details), he seems to be outrightly defying a decision of his own board in a brazen power play. I don't think unhinged is a controversial characterization of his choices both to flex power and get into personal attacks leading up to this point, and this seems like yet another entry.
So try looking at the face value of the events being reported before treating the reaction like it must be astroturfing. If you don't read about it, you won't have the context to know what the comments are reacting to.
There are a lot of people in this comment section repeating this as if it was an act of heresy, but I kinda do not see why one would do that?
I'd like to see terms like "unhinged" to stay reserved for non-made-up structures. Stuff where someone genuinely harms other people and not just their financial wants/needs/etc.
The board itself of course wants people to believe that it has power and not following its orders is wrong, but that's just.. their opinion. And they rely on someone actually believing that.
It is genuinely weird to me to keep reading this, because it's normal people defending how power structures in which they are not winning work. Why would one do that? What do you care if a board is respected?
I kinda get the general desire for "order" thing and all, but boards - generally speaking - do not get there through merit or a democratic mandate, nor do they act in the interest of normal people, so.. why care if he pisses his board off?
Care to the degree that is being cared here, I mean.
Should he be doing this? Probably not. But the immediate "victim" of it is most likely just a group of people with equally deep pockets doing exactly the same kind of brazen power play. I don't see why that would get strong emotions out of normal workers.
Unless of course it's not them at all. Hence that suspicion.
__
I've consulted the LLM about this, and while doing so, I've remembered that Boards usually are full of VCs, and YC is VC, so.
Yeah, I can see why not respecting the board would be seen as heresy here. Weird how all the money in the world cannot buy one everything, huh?
I think I can tell from how you're talking about boards that you're underestimating how many there are, how varied they are (non profits, community theaters, land trusts, boring but non-scandalous corporate governance) and how diverse their cultures and missions can be. And we don't need vague shower thoughts about how you think "most" boards work when there's a lot of reported detail about the Wordpress drama that sets the context for their operating conditions with a lot more specificity than your guesstimations.
It should be enough to note that the details coming straight out of the reporting are inflammatory enough to the average person that it can explain why there's a negative reaction against Mullenweg without having to assume it was astroturfed, which was the point you were originally making.
> To us, every moment we remained unfettered and in control was a success. We never had a manager. We never had a booking agent. We never had a lawyer. We never took an advance from a record company. We booked our own tours, paid our own bills, made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences. The results of that methodology speak for themselves: Nobody ever told us what to do, and nobody took any of our money.
If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.
I was just having a discussion about this with a friend who watched an NYU hosted debate in the 90s between the guy I can't remember from Sick Of It All and Sam McPheeters from Born Against. Born Against had been trolling Sick Of It All for ages (because it was fun), putting up posters, passing out fliers around their shows and talking about them for signing to a major label and distributor, and especially for censoring their lyric sheet in order to get sold at Walmart. Born Against was traditional DIY, on Sam's record label (Vermiform), didn't have bar codes on their records, mostly mailorder, etc.
Both were right, McPheeters was right that Sick Of It All had sold out and censored themselves in order to fit into corporate commerce, but the guy from Sick Of It All was more right. His position was that Born Against (like a Steve Albini) were rich middle class kids who were just having fun, and Sick Of It All were from working class families that they had to support. Music can be the most important thing for hobbyists, but that kind of music is just music. They on the other hand were looking for a ticket to a better life, and one that allowed them to do what they were good at and what they enjoyed.
So Born Against and their style ended up aped by the corporations, and spreads into emocore and all that shit, makes the companies billions, and Sam McPheeters ends up with zero of that. He's fine, he's writing columns for the Atlantic and doing interviews with NPR (incidentally because wealthy people pay to be close to "cool" people.) Meanwhile the style of music represented by Sick Of It All pretty much runs its course, but the members pocket a bunch of cash, and get to move on to do whatever else they want.
Purity is a privilege of the already wealthy. A lot of people chose Wordpress because it was the cheapest functional option (Free.) They were not interested in writing their own CMS, and couldn't afford to anyway.
> If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.
Also in respect to Mullenweg, afaik he owns 84% of the company. This never had a chance without his consent.
He has proxy agreements with Automattic's investors for 84% of the vote. I don't know how they're structured, but I saw from other discussions that they may be irrevocable.