Automattic Board Votes to Grant Founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg Paid Leave
The Automattic board voted to grant founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg paid leave, with CFO Mark Davies stepping in as interim CEO. The company officially confirmed the leave and interim appointment but did not respond to conspiracy allegations.
Mullenweg stated in a publicly visible Slack message that Davies, along with board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker, voted for his paid leave behind his back, while he himself voted against it. He mentioned that the resolution was delivered just 50 minutes before the meeting, and his repeated requests for even a few hours for independent legal review were denied. Davies later informed employees that Mullenweg remains on the board and still has a voice in direction and decision-making.
Automattic's official stance to the media is that Mullenweg is currently on leave, and Davies is leading the company as interim CEO, with the board having full confidence in his execution of priorities. Spokesperson Megan Fox confirmed this arrangement in writing to The Verge. Schneider clarified in an internal channel that it was the board that requested Mullenweg to temporarily step down from the CEO position.
Automattic was founded by Mullenweg in 2005 and includes WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and more. The open-source project WordPress.org is separate from the commercial company, and Mullenweg still controls the foundation side. Toni Schneider served as Automattic CEO from 2006 to 2014 before handing the position back to Mullenweg. The company's valuation was approximately $7.5 billion in 2021.
This leadership change occurs while a lawsuit against hosting provider WP Engine is still ongoing. Recent controversies surrounding trademarks, plugin directory login restrictions, and internal communication have strained the relationship between the commercial company and the open-source community. The board has not disclosed the specific reasons for this vote and has not defined the leave as a permanent dismissal.
In market terms, the buyers are enterprise clients seeking stability in hosting and plugin ecosystems, while the sellers are subscription revenues from WordPress.com and WooCommerce. The event is driven by governance conflicts rather than product releases. Beneficiaries include board members and large hosting providers looking to reduce litigation and community opposition risks; those under pressure are the growth narratives that tie the open-source brand to individuals. Control of WordPress.org has not transferred with the CEO position, potentially leading to dual management between the commercial company and the open-source project.
Automattic is a private company with no immediate stock price; points of observation include whether WP Engine will change legal strategies in the lawsuit and whether the login and plugin review rules for WordPress.org will change under the interim CEO's tenure.
Source: Public Information
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Mullenweg co-created WordPress in 2003, founded Automattic in 2005, initially appointing Schneider as CEO to learn management, and reclaimed operational control in 2014, subsequently acquiring WooCommerce, Tumblr, podcasting, and messaging assets. By 2021, when the valuation reached $7.5 billion, WordPress powered about 40% of the world's websites. In 2024, he publicly clashed with WP Engine: restricting logins, demanding severance, and court injunctions that constrained company operations. The presence of former professional CEO Schneider on the board indicates a reactivation of the old arrangement of founder dominance and institutional governance.
The capital pathway is not a new round of financing but a shift of control among existing board members. Davies taking over as CFO is framed as “execution” of priorities, effectively replacing the expansion narrative with loss mitigation and litigation management. Mullenweg retains his board seat and control over WordPress.org, meaning the commercial company can be restrained while the open-source trademark and directory remain in his hands. This is an incomplete power grab: while his operational signature can be halted, his community access cannot.
Comparable cases include the brief removal of Sam Altman by the OpenAI board, Mozilla's multiple CEO changes still bound by foundation bylaws, and the split between Elastic and AWS over open-source trademarks. Automattic is at a juncture of transitioning from founder warfare mode to institutional control, yet has not completed the legal separation between open-source and commercial interests. The WP Engine lawsuit turns personal actions into potential liabilities for the company, with the board using the leave to shift responsibility from "the founder is the company" to "interim professional management."
Structural judgment belongs to governance reconstruction amid capital concentration. The mechanism is: open-source projects hand pricing power to individuals controlling directories and trademarks, while commercial companies must deliver predictable behavior to clients and courts; when personal strategies become contingent liabilities, the board can only first remove the CEO title and then coexist with the founder who still controls the open-source switch. The result is a dual power structure: money resides in Automattic, rules in WordPress.org, and whoever concedes first loses ecological pricing power.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Open-source switches and company seals are often not in the same hands.
Paid leave is a suspension of power, not a conclusion.
When founders turn the company into a battlefield, the board turns them into a variable.