Analysis
Matt Mullenweg just found out what happens when a board finally runs out of patience with a founder who treats the company like his personal fiefdom. Automattic's directors voted September 9 to place him on leave against his will -- Mullenweg's own words, posted within minutes of the decision: "I voted against that." TechCrunch reported he got 50 minutes' notice before the meeting and was denied time for a lawyer to review the resolution. CFO Mark Davies is now interim CEO of a company that still, as far as anyone outside the boardroom can tell, has no actual succession plan.
I've watched a lot of founder-board fights up close, and the pattern here is depressingly familiar: the person who built the thing decides the rules that made it successful -- open source, community governance, playing nice with the ecosystem -- no longer apply to him. Mullenweg spent 2024 waging a public war against WP Engine, demanding an 8% revenue royalty, telling disagreeing employees to take severance and leave (159 did), and deactivating contributor plugin accounts when a community fork got floated. None of that is normal founder-CEO behavior at a company Automattic's size; it's the behavior of someone who forgot he answers to a board and, eventually, to the enterprise customers who depend on WordPress being boring and stable.
“A CMS powering close to 40% of the web running on unresolved founder governance is not a small tail risk.”
The number that should worry anyone with Automattic exposure isn't in this week's news -- it's the 16% headcount cut from April 2025, which happened during the WP Engine fight, not because of a demand slowdown. That's a founder burning organizational capital to win a grudge match, and boards eventually notice when the fight starts showing up on the P&L.
Room for disagreement: Mullenweg still controls Automattic through supervoting shares and remains chair of the WordPress Foundation, so "forced leave" may be more theater than a real removal -- he can likely reverse this the moment he wants to, and a board that can't actually fire him hasn't really constrained him at all. It's also fair to say some of the WP Engine fight was a legitimate defense of the open-source commons against a private-equity-owned hosting company monetizing GPL code without contributing back; Mullenweg wasn't entirely wrong on the merits, just reckless in the execution.
What I'd diligence if I had exposure here: whether Davies has actual operating authority or is a caretaker until Mullenweg cools off, and whether any enterprise WordPress VIP customers have exit clauses tied to leadership stability. A CMS powering close to 40% of the web running on unresolved founder governance is not a small tail risk.
