Is Automattic Still a Thing? Mullenweg Retakes Control After a 48-Hour Board Coup
Short answer: yes. Automattic still employs thousands of people, still owns WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Pocket Casts and Beeper, and still collects revenue from all of them. Longer answer: it just spent two days with two different people claiming to run it, and the board hasn’t said anything in public since.
What actually happened
On Wednesday the board voted to put founder and chief executive Matt Mullenweg on paid leave. CFO Mark Davies was named interim CEO. Mullenweg told staff in a company-wide Slack channel that Davies had conspired with board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider and Sue Decker to push it through, that he voted against it, and that he received the resolution fifty minutes before the meeting started. He asked for time to have independent counsel review it, even a few hours. He says that was refused.
The company confirmed the leave to reporters at the time. Davies posted in the same Slack channel that Mullenweg remained a board member and would still have a voice in setting direction. Schneider, who ran Automattic as CEO himself from 2006 to 2014, told staff the board was confident Davies would steer the ship.
That lasted until Friday morning, when Mullenweg posted again: the board was back in agreement, he was in control of Automattic, and he hoped much of the past 48 hours had been a misunderstanding. Davies’ Slack account was deactivated. Mullenweg reportedly removed every admin from the company Slack. Mary Hubbard, who runs WordPress.org day to day, went on X to say she was relieved and pleased to see him back as CEO.
Then came the part you probably saw. Mullenweg posted that if you don’t have a coup attempt every few years, you aren’t hiring strong enough leaders. In a follow-up he said he thinks this was his fifth. He told a reporter a blog post was coming. The blog post, when it landed, was about buying a houseboat.
The part nobody has confirmed
The board has issued no statement about the reinstatement. Everything we know about the reversal comes from one Slack message and the founder’s own social media. The company confirmed the removal on Wednesday and has not confirmed the return.
That gap matters more than the jokes. A private company with a small board can absolutely reverse itself in 48 hours, and an outvoted founder with a big equity position has ways of making that happen. But a functioning board would normally say so, if only to reassure customers and enterprise clients who just watched their vendor’s leadership change twice in a week. Silence suggests the fight isn’t finished, or that the terms of the truce aren’t something anyone wants written down yet.
Mullenweg has pointed at Silver Lake, the private equity firm that owns a majority of WP Engine, suggesting its interests were behind the move against him. WP Engine has been in litigation with Automattic since 2024.
Why this isn’t really about Automattic
The company is not at risk of disappearing. It is profitable enough, diversified enough, and privately held, which means it doesn’t have to explain itself to anyone.
The thing worth watching is WordPress itself, and the two are not the same asset. The lawsuit is one problem: WP Engine’s suit stems directly from Mullenweg’s actions in 2024, and there’s a pending sanctions motion accusing him of failing to preserve evidence, with the company’s own e-discovery vendor reporting that a laptop and a phone couldn’t be accounted for. That’s the kind of procedural mess that costs more than the underlying dispute.
The bigger problem is quieter. WordPress has been losing CMS market share. WordCamp attendance has been falling. Neither of those reverses because a board meeting went a certain way. They reflect a platform where the open source project, the trademark, the plugin directory and the largest commercial vendor all route through one person’s judgment, and where that person publicly treats governance disputes as entertainment.
If you run sites on WordPress, this week changes nothing about your Tuesday. Your installs work, your hosting works, your plugins update. What it should change is how much of your long-term planning assumes the ecosystem stays stable by default. It has been proving otherwise for two years now, and the leadership drama is a symptom rather than the disease.
Automattic is still a thing. WordPress being the obvious default in 2030 is the question that’s actually open.