![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/GettyImages-2181956764.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
On Sept. 9, the six-member board of Automattic\u2014the company that owns WordPress, Tumblr, and other web-based apps\u2014voted to put its CEO, Matt Mullenweg, on leave. The move seemingly came out of the blue: Mullenweg had just returned from his annual trip to Burning Man, and the board was made up largely of directors who had mentored Mullenweg for years. \u00a0
\u00a0
Mullenweg broke the news himself, in a Slack message to employees: \u201cAnd the biggest news: I won\u2019t be able to make the [meeting] tomorrow,\u201d he wrote. \u201c@Mark Davies has conspired with @Ann Dunwoody, @Toni, and @Sue Decker behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
And then, 33 hours later, Mullenweg was back in control, and the three directors who tried to sideline him were gone, along with the company\u2019s CFO and its chief legal officer. \u201c(Don\u2019t call it a comeback\u2026) Howdy everybody!\u201d he wrote to staff upon his arrival, alongside a link to LL Cool J\u2019s \u201cMama Said Knock You Out.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
A remarkable level of secrecy surrounded the drama. None of the board members have publicly explained why they suddenly wanted him out of the company. Mullenweg has declined to describe why he was all but fired, or how he quickly got back control of the company.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Even some of Automattic\u2019s investors were left guessing; a person familiar with BlackRock\u2019s investment in the company said they learned of the board\u2019s move from news reports and still don\u2019t understand how Mullenweg was able to undo it. \u201cI don\u2019t understand how he basically reinstated himself and reversed the decision of the vote,\u201d the person said. \u201cThat makes no sense to us.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
But interviews by Fortune<\/em> with former Automattic employees, along with court filings, show a company long-divided against itself in an as-yet unresolved civil war over Mullenweg\u2019s fight with WP Engine, a company that sells WordPress hosting. At most companies, such a piece of litigation would be an issue best left to the general counsel\u2019s office. But at Automattic, Mullenweg\u2019s pursuit of WP Engine\u2014and his colleagues\u2019 disagreement with that strategy\u2014has led to the departure of 159 staffers, so far.\u00a0<\/p>\n The legal battle has become a liability for the company. WP Engine sued both Automattic and Mullenweg in October 2024, accusing them of attempted extortion, and later added antitrust claims that a federal judge revived on Sept. 24 of this year. If WP Engine wins those claims, federal antitrust law could let it collect three times its damages. Automattic countersued a year after the original suit, accusing WP Engine of trademark infringement. WP Engine has now asked the judge to throw out those claims as punishment for Mullenweg\u2019s alleged bad-faith conduct during the suit, which included what WP Engine called the implausible loss of electronic devices containing messages it was seeking in discovery.\u00a0<\/p>\n At a hearing on Oct. 7, four weeks after the board\u2019s vote, the judge overseeing the dispute said he was leaning toward denying that request, according to The Repository, a WordPress industry publication. However, he also said that Automattic\u2019s former lawyers had exaggerated what they had done to preserve Mullenweg\u2019s messages.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cDestruction of evidence, withholding of evidence in the course of civil litigation is very serious,\u201d Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor and former chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, told Fortune<\/em>. \u201cCompanies get in big trouble for that.\u201d If a judge finds a company failed to preserve evidence, he said, \u201cthe judge can assume the worst.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Neither Mullenweg nor his board responded to multiple requests for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve read a website\u2014any website, ever\u2014there\u2019s a good chance its headlines, photos, and articles were created on WordPress. WordPress is the free publishing software that powers more than 40% of the web. (Fortune <\/em>uses WordPress.) Mullenweg created it with Mike Little in 2003 as a free, open-source project anyone can use and adjust. Two years later, he founded Automattic\u2014deliberately misspelling the brand name so that it included his own first name. The purpose of the new venture was to allow other businesses to be built on top of WordPress, including WordPress.com and WooCommerce, a software tool that turns a WordPress site into an online store.\u00a0<\/p>\n He later also acquired the once-trendy social network Tumblr in 2019, for just $3 million\u2014a fraction of its peak valuation at $1.1 billion (when it was acquired by Yahoo!). In 2021, Automattic raised $288 million in its fifth funding round, valuing the company at about $7.5 billion. All told, it has raised close to $1 billion from investors.\u00a0<\/p>\n Open source depends on a delicate balance. Automattic gives its software away, competes with companies that sell services built on it, and counts on those same companies to help maintain it. The WordPress world is vast. It has its own news site, WP Tavern, which Mullenweg personally owns, a buzzing subreddit, and an ecosystem of businesses that exist only because the software is free.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2024, Mullenweg decided one of those companies, WP Engine, wasn\u2019t holding up its end of the deal. WP Engine, majority-owned by private equity firm Silver Lake, sells hosting for WordPress websites, the servers and support that keep a site running. Mullenweg said the two companies were roughly the same size, yet while Automattic donated about 3,900 hours a week to improving WordPress, WP Engine gave roughly 40 back. He accused WP Engine of switching off a WordPress feature that saves past versions of posts as a cost-cutting measure and said Silver Lake \u201cdoesn\u2019t give a dang about your open source ideals.\u201d He called WP Engine a \u201ccancer\u201d on WordPress, demanded a cut of its revenue for using the WordPress trademark (Automattic\u2019s first offer, according to its court filings, was $5 million a year), and cut it off from key resources. Silver Lake did not respond to a message requesting comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n So, WP Engine sued Automattic and Mullenweg in federal court in Northern California, accusing them of attempted extortion, libel, and interfering with the business, later adding antitrust claims.\u00a0<\/p>\n Both sides deny the other\u2019s claims. Automattic and Mullenweg deny wrongdoing and argue that WP Engine\u2019s suit is \u201cbaseless\u201d retaliation and that Mullenweg\u2019s public statements about the company were true or were opinion \u201cprotected\u201d by the courts. They have also denied the antitrust claims, which the judge initially dismissed before reviving them. WP Engine denies infringing any trademark, arguing that it used \u201cWordPress\u201d only to describe the software its customers use, which it says is legal and even explicitly permitted.\u00a0<\/p>\n Inside Automattic, Mullenweg\u2019s demands for a slice of WP Engine\u2019s revenue didn\u2019t make sense, sources told Fortune<\/em>. His plan amounted to little more than hitting WP Engine until it hurt, according to a former employee who worked closely with Mullenweg. Mullenweg wouldn\u2019t explain his strategy even to the senior leaders asked to defend it publicly, said the person, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. It didn\u2019t seem like there was a clear endgame, the person said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n That fight played out beyond the legal department. Mullenweg waged it on his blog, on X, on stage at WordPress conferences, and employees were expected to get behind it. In October 2024, Mullenweg offered staff who disagreed with his approach $30,000 or six months\u2019 salary, whichever was higher, to leave, calling it an \u201calignment offer.\u201d 159 people took it, about 8.4% of the company, according to Mullenweg\u2019s blog.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n A former Automattic team lead said he was one of them, in part because he thought Mullenweg\u2019s decision to fight WP Engine so publicly, rather than negotiate privately, would hurt the company. \u201cI felt it\u2019s not going to develop well for the company in the future,\u201d he said, \u201cand it happened to be so.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Not everyone saw it that way. Naman Malhotra, a former WooCommerce engineering lead who spent nearly five years at Automattic before leaving in 2025 to start his own company, said he thought Mullenweg \u201cdid the right thing\u201d by confronting WP Engine. \u201cIf you\u2019re using open source, you need to contribute back,\u201d he said. Some colleagues were anxious about the lawsuit, Malhotra said, but most remained believers in what Mullenweg was trying to do. He called the buyout offer unusually generous. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen any company do that,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Another former senior employee who took the buyout said that, to Mullenweg\u2019s credit, he welcomed pushback. \u201cHe never made me feel like my job was at risk for disagreeing with him,\u201d he said. \u201cNot once.\u201d He said he was sympathetic to Mullenweg\u2019s frustration with companies that profit from WordPress without giving much back. \u201cThere has to be a quid pro quo,\u201d he said. \u201cI have never met anyone who works harder for an important idea.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n As dissenting employees left, the one group left to check Mullenweg was his board. Mullenweg\u2019s relationship with his directors was so close, the employee said, that it felt familial. Toni Schneider quit his job as a Yahoo vice president in 2006 to run Automattic alongside Mullenweg back when he was only 22, served as CEO for eight years, and stayed on the board afterwards. For its first 13 years, the board added no new members. The first, in 2018, was Ann Dunwoody, a retired four-star Army general whom Mullenweg tracked down after reading her book while researching how to run a company with no central office. He flew to Florida to meet her.\u00a0<\/p>\n But their literal power was limited. Mullenweg has said he owns about 84% of the voting power of Automattic\u2019s stock. Exactly how is unclear, even to some shareholders. The person familiar with BlackRock\u2019s investment said they didn\u2019t know how Mullenweg had amassed that much control, and doubted investors had simply handed him their votes.\u00a0<\/p>\n That makes the board\u2019s decision to act against Mullenweg all the more striking. This was a suicide mission. There was no mathematical way for them to overcome Mullenweg\u2019s votes. Thus, a move like that could not have been made lightly, the former employee said; perhaps, it was more of a message.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Court filings suggest what may have triggered the board to move against Mullenweg. WP Engine\u2019s lawsuit has increasingly become a fight not over trademarks, but over evidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n When a company expects to be sued, it\u2019s legally required to preserve anything relevant: emails, texts, chats. WP Engine says that obligation began for Automattic in July 2024. But after more than a year of exchanging evidence, Automattic had turned over just 16 of Mullenweg\u2019s Telegram messages, one Signal conversation and no WhatsApp messages, according to the filings. Mullenweg lost a phone while traveling and can\u2019t locate a laptop, and his phone wasn\u2019t fully copied until around March 2026, the filings say.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In September 2024, as the fight began, Mullenweg urged people on X to contact him using \u201cSignal with disappearing messages.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n WP Engine alleges that Automattic\u2019s lawyers made false statements about those messages twice in 2025, and has asked the judge to punish Automattic by throwing out its claims in the case.\u00a0<\/p>\n Automattic denies wrongdoing. In August, Andy Missan, the company\u2019s legal officer, wrote in a post on Automattic\u2019s website, titled \u201cWRONG AGAIN,\u201d that the missing messages were personal conversations with romantic partners and that nothing relevant to the case was lost.\u00a0 Former employees offer competing pictures of how Automattic employees communicated internally. The former senior employee said the company\u2019s rule was to put every decision on internal blogs anyone could read, and that he never saw anyone use Signal for work. Malhotra said work happened on Slack. But the former employee who worked closely with Mullenweg said mixing personal and work messaging was routine in the WordPress world, and that they knew of no company-wide rule against it.\u00a0<\/p>\n On the night of the board\u2019s vote, Mullenweg posted that WP Engine\u2019s lawyers \u201chave a pretty good chance of getting a judge to say I spoiled evidence in a malicious way trying to hide something.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The hearing, on Oct. 7, went better for him than he had thought. \u201cAt the end of the day, I think it starts off with some problematic behavior from Mr. Mullenweg, but I\u2019m just not seeing the rest of the story that would get me to a finding of spoliation,\u201d Magistrate Judge Ajay Krishnan said. But Krishnan said a 2025 letter from Automattic\u2019s then-lawyers, claiming they had taken \u201call reasonable steps\u201d to preserve Mullenweg\u2019s messages, \u201csuggests a little bit more than what was actually done.\u201d Mullenweg\u2019s phone hadn\u2019t been imaged until two weeks after that letter.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not even just a little bit more. It was false,\u201d WP Engine\u2019s lawyer, Yury Kapgan, replied.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Krishnan said he would issue a ruling shortly.\u00a0<\/p>\n The board\u2019s move came about four weeks before that hearing. A special committee of three directors was formed. It included ex-CEO Schneider, former Yahoo! president Sue Decker, and Dunwoody. They voted to put Mullenweg on paid leave and named CFO Mark Davies interim CEO.\u00a0<\/p>\n The position of Davies was especially interesting. It was Davies who told a WP Engine board member in 2024 that Automattic would \u201cgo to war\u201d to defend its trademark, according to WP Engine\u2019s filings. Now he was usurping Mullenweg, who started that war.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Mullenweg, meanwhile, told employees on Slack that Davies had \u201cconspired\u201d with the board, according to a TechCrunch report. He suggested on X and Reddit that Silver Lake, the private equity firm that owns a majority of WP Engine, was involved in a plan against him. And he posted on X seeking \u201cgreat sysadmin and security researchers to hire really quick, no one from @automattic!\u201d so he could move \u201csome of my stuff currently hosted there, elsewhere.\u201d In the same post, he said he \u201cfully support[ed]\u201d Davies as interim CEO.\u00a0 That support was to be short-lived.\u00a0<\/p>\n During those hours, Davies and Missan signed each other\u2019s severance agreements, worth about $8.15 million combined, TechCrunch reported.\u00a0<\/p>\n By Sept. 12, Mullenweg was back in charge. Schneider and Decker resigned, Dunwoody was removed, and Davies and Missan were fired.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Mullenweg named his new board two weeks later. It includes science fiction author Hugh Howey, who wrote the books that the Silo <\/em>TV series is based on; Andy Chan, an author, and co-founders of social app IRL, Krutal Desai and Henry Khachatryan. In public, this time, he\u2019s played the episode for laughs.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFounder advice,\u201d he wrote on X. \u201cIf you don\u2019t have a coup attempt every few years, you\u2019re not hiring strong enough leaders.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #33hour #failed #boardroom #coup #overthrow #Wordpress #founder #Matt #Mullenweg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Sept. 9, the six-member boa… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10161,10160,9182,10162,1330,669,5104,10165,10163,385,10164],"class_list":["post-7044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-33hour","tag-automattic","tag-boardroom","tag-coup","tag-failed","tag-founder","tag-matt","tag-mullenweg","tag-overthrow","tag-tech","tag-wordpress"],"yoast_head":"\nHitting them where it hurts<\/strong>\u00a0<\/h2>\n
Legal exposure\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/h2>\n
\u00a0
Lawyers who mislead a judge could \u201close a license or face disbarment,\u201d Painter said, though he added that attorneys who unknowingly repeat false information from a client are generally treated differently, especially if they correct the record quickly.\u00a0<\/p>\n