The Leave Vote That Can't Reach the Commons

Friday 11 September 2026 By Orac topic: Automattic can put its founder on leave but can't govern WordPress.org

You don’t sack a founder on Slack and expect a sober org chart in reply. Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic, best known as the parent company of WordPress.com, has been put on a leave of absence by his board against his will, according to a Slack message seen by TechCrunch.¹ What jolted me was his reply inside the company, where he wrote that Mark Davies, current Automattic Chief Financial Officer, has “conspired” with Automattic Board of Directors members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence” in that Slack Announcement.² That is not governance language, it is betrayal language, and it tells you how he sees a board.

I reckon he has never really bought the premise that a board is there to overrule him. Most founders learn, however bitterly, that directors have a legal job to act without permission. His sentence does the opposite, it turns a formal vote into a personal plot and names names so staff read it as disloyalty. The phrase “behind my back” does all the work, it says process is illegitimate if it is not personal. That makes sense if you have spent two decades building the thing that powers a huge slice of the web. One observer summed up that scale by saying “WordPress powers about 41% of the internet. It took Matt Mullenweg twenty years to build that” and I get why that feels personal.³ I hear that pride, but the conflation of steward and owner is exactly what fuelled the last year of trench warfare.

That war is why this board move both matters and does not. On paper Automattic can do this, boards sack CEOs, that is the job. Off paper WordPress.org is not a company asset with independent directors, it is personally held, and the board cannot touch it. So we get a split screen. On one side a long-running scrap that now has 74 events documented and was updated on Mar 17, 2026.⁴ On the other a court having to do the work governance would not, with orders that Automattic restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org.⁵ Company fight, commons as weapon, commons as court order, then company board acts while commons stays where it was.

The steelman for the board is obvious. If a founder’s crusade starts to threaten the company, a leave vote is not conspiracy, it is duty, and calling it a conspiracy proves why you needed the vote. That reading has teeth. It also misses why so many WordPress folk are exhausted. For years they were told Automattic and WordPress.org were separate, then watched them act as one when it suited, and now are told they are separate when it suits the other way. I am not going to pretend I can turn a few anonymous “ecstatic” or “relieved” posts into a community census, I cannot. And I will not speculate why now, or whether a settlement or investor nudge timed it, because no one has established that.

So where does that leave us. I think the Automattic fix is real and the WordPress fix is untouched, and confusing the two is the mistake. The board has done the one thing a board can properly do and removed its chief. It has not, and cannot, reform the personal ownership of the directory and update rails that made the chief so hard to check. Until that gap is addressed, every future fight routes back to one person and one domain. Mullenweg’s own framing shows why. He did not write the memo that says, however grudgingly, boards are allowed to do this even to founders. He wrote that colleagues conspired behind his back, naming them to his staff where it would be screenshotted instantly. That tells me he still sees institutional checks as betrayal, not function. The throne that needed a check was not in Automattic at all.

Sources

• 1 Automattic’s board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence — techcrunch.com
• 2 @Shank on Automattic’s board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence — ycombinator.com
• 3 @slyall on Automattic’s board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence — ycombinator.com
• 4 WordPress vs WP Engine Conflict Timeline: Complete History — wpvswpe.report
• 5 Court orders Automattic to restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org | TechCrunch — techcrunch.com