Analysis
Matt Mullenweg, the co-creator of WordPress and longtime CEO of Automattic, told employees on Slack that he's back in control of the company, just two days after its board voted to place him on paid leave, TechCrunch reported September 11. Pulse first covered the board's decision to place Mullenweg on leave when it happened September 9, with CFO Mark Davies named interim CEO in his place.
What's changed since that earlier coverage: Mullenweg now says the board has reversed itself entirely. In his Slack message, seen by TechCrunch, he wrote that 'the board is back in agreement, and I'm in control of Automattic.' Davies' Slack account has since been deactivated, and Mullenweg has reportedly removed all other admins from the company's Slack workspace -- concrete, verifiable actions that go beyond a simple claim of authority, even though Automattic itself has not issued any official confirmation of the reversal.
Mullenweg addressed the episode publicly on X, writing 'if you don't have a coup attempt every few years, you're not hiring strong enough leaders,' and adding in a separate post, 'I think this was my fifth.' That framing -- treating repeated leadership crises as evidence of a strong bench rather than a governance failure -- follows a pattern from Mullenweg's 2025 public fight with hosting company WP Engine, in which he used WordPress.org's own infrastructure to pressure a commercial rival, drawing sustained criticism from parts of the open-source community he leads.
“What's changed since that earlier coverage: Mullenweg now says the board has reversed itself entirely.”
Automattic remains privately held, last valued at roughly $7.5 billion in a 2021 tender offer, with a workforce of close to 1,700 people distributed globally rather than centralized in an office. That structure matters here: a public company facing an unconfirmed 48-hour CEO reversal would face immediate disclosure obligations and likely a halted stock; a private company with concentrated founder control faces none of that, leaving the actual state of Automattic's leadership to be pieced together from Slack screenshots and social media posts rather than any formal governance record.
What the headline misses is the real operational exposure sitting underneath the drama: Automattic's products power WordPress.com sites, Jetpack security and performance tools, and WooCommerce's e-commerce backend for a meaningful share of the web. Enterprise customers and agencies relying on those products for uptime and support don't get a say in a boardroom standoff, and a company that can't produce a clear, confirmed answer to 'who is actually the CEO right now' is not a stable vendor relationship during the two days that question stays open.
The unresolved question is whether Automattic's board issues any statement of its own confirming or disputing Mullenweg's account, and whether Davies -- whose Slack account is now deactivated -- makes any public statement of his own. Until one side produces independent confirmation, this remains a claim made by the person with the most to gain from it being believed.
Automattic's investor base includes Salesforce Ventures, which led a $300 million Series D in 2019 valuing the company at $3 billion, alongside earlier backers Insight Partners, Tiger Global and True Ventures -- all of whom now face the same information gap as employees and customers: a private company's board dispute playing out through screenshots rather than a filed disclosure. For a company whose products sit deep in the infrastructure of the open web, that gap is the story as much as who ultimately holds the CEO title.
