Automattic says Mullenweg is CEO again, three days after removing him

Automattic has confirmed that Matt Mullenweg is its chairman and chief executive. The confirmation came three days after its own board put him on paid leave and installed someone else in the job.

A company spokesperson gave the confirmation to Sarah Perez at TechCrunch just after 5pm Eastern on Saturday. Mullenweg holds both roles “with full support of the board”, the spokesperson said. The statement added that many executives and Automatticians have posted support online.

TechCrunch noted what that last part appears to point to. Mullenweg has been reposting supportive messages from his own X account.

Automattic owns WordPress.com and is the largest financial contributor to the WordPress project. It has given no reason for the original vote.

Wednesday: the board moved

404 Media broke the news on 9 September. Mullenweg had told staff on Slack that the board voted to put him on a paid leave of absence. He voted against it, he said. He wrote that chief financial officer Mark Davies had conspired with the board.

The board made Davies interim chief executive. In a separate Slack message, Davies said Mullenweg would remain a board member, according to 404 Media.

Automattic confirmed all of it at the time. A spokesperson told TechCrunch and The Verge that Mullenweg was currently on leave. Davies had the board’s full confidence, the spokesperson said.

Thursday: he did not go quietly

Mullenweg answered a Reddit thread about the news with “Hey y’all. I’m here, just fine.” He later told people speculating about the consequences for the open source community that they did not know what they were talking about.

On X he wrote that things are different than they appear. He also asked to hire sysadmins and security researchers quickly, specifying nobody from Automattic. He said he sits on the board and fully supports Davies as interim chief executive. He also thought it was probably good to move some of his own hosting elsewhere.

In the same run of posts he pointed at Silver Lake and named a partner there. Private equity firms will try to destroy your life, he wrote. Silver Lake is the majority owner of WP Engine, the hosting company Automattic and Mullenweg are suing. The firm has been busy elsewhere, merging Cegid and Silae into a €10bn French software group this month.

Friday: the Slack post

Mullenweg then posted in Automattic’s company-wide announcements channel. TechCrunch reported it first, from a screenshot, with multiple employees confirming.

“Happy to announce the board is back in agreement, and I’m in control of Automattic,” he wrote. A lot happened in the past 48 hours that needs sorting out, he added. He hopes much of it was a misunderstanding. He opened the post with “Don’t call it a comeback” and linked the video for LL Cool J’s Mama Said Knock You Out.

Other things happened on Slack that week. Mullenweg removed the other admins. He posted that he is a pirate and swore, which colleagues noted he does not normally do. His Slack picture shows him in a pirate hat and eyepatch.

“If this is an HR problem, please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with Mark Davies,” he wrote in another post. Sources told both TechCrunch and 404 Media that Davies’s Slack account had been switched off.

TechCrunch asked Mullenweg whether he was trolling. “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously,” he replied. He promised a blog post. It arrived on Friday morning under the heading Major Life Announcement. It was about his offer to buy a houseboat, and it did not mention Automattic.

WordPress.org backed him before the company did

Mary Hubbard is executive director of WordPress.org. She posted on X on Friday that she was relieved and pleased to see Mullenweg return as chief executive. Having the co-founder and project lead at the helm gives her confidence the company’s support for WordPress will hold, she wrote. The official WordPress account shared her post.

That came a day before Automattic itself said anything.

Mullenweg posted his own summary on X. If you do not have a coup attempt every few years, he wrote, you are not hiring strong enough leaders. He added that he thinks this was his fifth. Coup is his word, and he used it after the company had already reinstated him.

What is still unresolved

The board has not explained the original vote, and it has told employees nothing beyond the Wednesday Slack messages, sources told 404 Media.

TechCrunch reported hearing that board member Toni Schneider is stepping down. Automattic did not respond to its questions about that, it said. Schneider was Automattic’s chief executive for eight years and now runs Bluesky. He did not answer requests for comment sent to his personal email or through Bluesky.

TechCrunch also reported that the board’s composition may still be in flux. Davies has made no public statement.

Why this reaches past one company

WordPress runs a large share of the web. The people who maintain it sit inside this dispute. TNW reported in July that attackers were mass-exploiting two WordPress flaws, and in April that someone had bought 30 plugins and planted backdoors in all of them. Automattic is also pushing the platform into automation, letting AI agents write and publish on WordPress.com.

404 Media reported that workers have described two years of destabilising leadership, listing layoffs, loyalty checks, abandoned community projects, trolling, and watermarked internal messages used to trace leaks.

Neither Mullenweg, Davies nor Automattic answered 404 Media’s questions for its report. Automattic did not answer TechCrunch on Friday either, before the statement on Saturday.