The founder is on leave

The founder of Automattic is on leave. It is a forced leave. Matt Mullenweg, who created the company behind WordPress.com, announced his own removal to his employees on Wednesday. He did it on Slack. The message was public to the entire company. In it, Mullenweg claimed the decision was made against his will, an unusual and blunt admission for any chief executive, let alone one so central to a company’s identity for so long. He did not go quietly. The company he built has just put him on the sidelines, turning a corporate dispute into a very public spectacle that has been brewing for years.

He named his opponents. Mullenweg's message, seen by journalists at TechCrunch and 404 Media, was specific. He accused the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Davies, of working against him. He claimed Davies 'conspired' with members of the board. Three members. He named them as Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider and Sue Decker. According to Mullenweg’s account of the meeting, this group acted together to engineer his removal from operational control of the business he has led as chief executive since 2014. The accusation of a conspiracy is direct. It is not subtle.

The mechanism was a simple vote. ‘They voted to put me on a paid leave of absence’, Mullenweg wrote to his staff. The statement confirms both the action and its contested nature. It was not a unanimous decision by a board aligned with its leader on the best path forward for the company. Far from it. Mullenweg made his own position on the matter completely clear in the next sentence. ‘I voted against that’. This was a boardroom battle that the founder lost. The result is a paid, but involuntary, absence from the company he created. He is out.

This is not a quiet retirement. It is an ousting. The board of a major technology firm has removed its founder and chief executive from his duties. They have done so without his consent. The event places the man most associated with the WordPress software, which powers a vast portion of the internet, into a state of corporate limbo. His future at Automattic is completely uncertain. The board has taken control. For now, they have won.

He helped build a third of the internet

To understand Matt Mullenweg’s removal, you first have to understand WordPress. That is not simple. There are two. One is a piece of free, open source software called WordPress.org, a community project Mullenweg co-founded which anyone can download and use to build a website. The other is WordPress.com, a commercial business owned by his company, Automattic, which uses that same software to host websites for customers who pay a fee. Mullenweg’s career has been a long and complicated balancing act between the non profit ideals of the first entity and the commercial demands of the second, a company he himself founded to monetise the project he helped start. He is the link between them. Or he was.

His reputation rests on that open source project. It was a digital commons. WordPress.org provided the tools for anyone, from a teenager in their bedroom to a global newspaper, to publish online without needing permission from a technology giant. Mullenweg was not just a coder. He became the figurehead for a movement. This was his power base. He built a global community of developers and users who believed in the mission of a more open internet, making him a profoundly influential figure long before he was a conventional chief executive with a board to answer to. The software spread everywhere. The code he helped create now runs a vast portion of the modern web.

Automattic was the answer to a different question. The question of money. Open source software is free to use, but building a business around it is hard. Mullenweg founded Automattic to do just that, creating the commercial WordPress.com service and other products. This is the company. This is the source of the revenue, the investors and the board members now in open conflict with their founder. Automattic became the corporate machine built on top of the community project, a structure that allowed Mullenweg to preside over both a decentralised, almost political movement and a traditional, hierarchical company. This structure created a fundamental and perhaps ultimately unmanageable tension.

He became chief executive of Automattic in 2014. For a decade, he has been the public face of the entire WordPress ecosystem, part community leader and part corporate boss. To the outside world, Matt Mullenweg is WordPress. This dual role granted him enormous personal authority, but it also placed him squarely at the centre of competing interests. He was the guardian of the open source flame. He was also the chief executive responsible for shareholder returns. One man, two jobs. The conflict was baked into the structure from the very beginning. Now that structure has broken. The board of his own company has decided that one of those jobs is over.

Signs of a long-running fight

This was not a sudden argument. It was the end of one. The board’s decision on Wednesday seems to have been the final move in a game that has been playing out for years, a slow-motion collision between a founder and the company he created. The roots of this week’s dramatic removal stretch back into the public record. They are deep. Traces of the conflict are visible to anyone who was watching closely. One moment stands out. It was a fight Mullenweg started himself.

In 2024, Mullenweg launched a public pressure campaign. The specifics of that dispute are now less important than the method he chose to fight it, a decision to go outside the boardroom and rally his followers to get his way. This is not how a chief executive is supposed to behave. A chief executive reports to the board. They do not ordinarily try to arm-twist directors by mobilising a public outcry against them. Mullenweg was using his status as the spiritual leader of the open source WordPress project to win a corporate battle inside Automattic. He was setting his two jobs against each other. It worked, at the time. But the board would not have forgotten it.

Such a move creates a profound crisis of trust. The directors he targeted would have seen it as a hostile act, a founder using his personal fame to circumvent their authority and their legal duties to the company. A board’s role is to provide oversight. Its role is to protect the interests of the shareholders and the long term health of the business, not to rubber stamp the impulses of a charismatic founder. When Mullenweg took the fight public, he was effectively telling his own board that their judgement was secondary to his own vision and his ability to command the loyalty of the WordPress community. It was a declaration of independence from the very people who were meant to hold him accountable. This cannot be ignored. A line was crossed.

For directors with backgrounds in conventional corporate or even military structures, like former four star general Ann Dunwoody, this kind of insubordination would be a serious matter. It suggests a leader who does not respect the chain of command. The 2024 campaign may have settled a specific policy disagreement, but it left behind a much larger and more dangerous problem. The board now knew their chief executive was willing to use an external power base against them. They had a leader who answered to his community first, and to his board second. From that moment, the relationship was likely broken. It was only a matter of when, not if, the final confrontation would come. Wednesday was that day.

How a board removes its CEO

The end came on a Wednesday. It came in a meeting room. A vote was called. The board of Automattic decided to place its own founder and chief executive on a leave of absence. He did not go quietly. In a message posted to the company’s internal Slack, seen by journalists at TechCrunch, Matt Mullenweg told his employees that the decision was taken against his will. He called it a conspiracy.

His accusation was specific. He pointed the finger directly at his own chief financial officer, Mark Davies. A chief financial officer is meant to be the chief executive’s partner, the person who translates the CEO’s vision into balance sheets and manages the flow of cash that keeps the enterprise alive. For a CFO to allegedly work with the board against his own boss suggests a complete breakdown of the company’s leadership. It is the corporate equivalent of a cabinet turning on its prime minister. Davies, according to Mullenweg, was not a loyal lieutenant. He was a ringleader.

Davies was not alone. Mullenweg says he conspired with three board members. They were Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider and Sue Decker. In his message, reported by the website 404 Media, Mullenweg stated plainly what happened in the meeting. ‘They voted to put me on a paid leave of absence’, he wrote. ‘I voted against that’. His one vote was not enough. He was outmanoeuvred. The maths was simple. Four votes beat one. This is how a company is supposed to work. The board of directors is not a fan club for the founder, it has a fiduciary duty to the corporation itself and to its shareholders. The chief executive is an employee of that corporation, hired by the board to run the company day to day. They serve at the board's pleasure. If the board loses confidence in the CEO, for any reason at all, it has the power and the duty to remove them. That power is absolute. It is the bedrock of corporate governance in the United States, where Automattic is incorporated. Mullenweg, for all his status as the public face of WordPress, was still just an employee. An employee the board had just suspended.

The mechanism chosen was a 'paid leave of absence'. This is not a final termination. Not yet. It is a corporate deep freeze, a way for the board to take control of the company immediately while lawyers work out the details of a permanent separation in the background. The fact that it is paid is standard. It is designed to ensure the executive complies with their contractual obligations during a sensitive period, preventing them from starting a new competing venture or speaking improperly about the company’s affairs. Mullenweg is still technically the chief executive of Automattic. He just cannot do the job. He is locked out of his own office.

The alleged role of Mark Davies in this process is the most telling detail. CFOs are guardians of financial propriety and strategic soundness. They are pragmatists. They live in a world of cash flow projections, audit reports and investor calls. For a chief financial officer to break ranks with his chief executive is an exceptionally rare and serious event, suggesting that the disagreement was not merely a matter of personality. It points to a fundamental conflict over the direction, performance or management of the business. Davies’s vote, if cast as Mullenweg claims, would have carried immense weight with the other directors. It was a signal from inside the machine. A signal that something was profoundly wrong.

What happens to WordPress now?

The founder is out. For now. This leaves Automattic, the powerful commercial entity behind WordPress.com, in the hands of the very people who orchestrated his removal. They are the winners. The board won. Chief Financial Officer Mark Davies appears to have secured his position by siding with them, suggesting his vision for the company's financial future will now take precedence over whatever path Mullenweg was charting. The question is what that vision entails. It almost certainly involves a clearer, quicker, and more aggressive route to profitability, a path which may have been obstructed by a founder protective of his creation’s original spirit.

This is not just an internal power struggle. It has consequences for millions of people. For users of the paid service, WordPress.com, the change could be stark and swift. A new leadership, likely a hired chief executive with a background in maximising revenue, might look to rationalise the platform. This could mean higher prices. It could mean the end of certain free or low cost tiers. It could mean a product that starts to feel less like a quirky tool for bloggers and more like a slick, homogenised competitor to other website builders. The soul of the service is now up for grabs. Mullenweg’s departure creates a vacuum that will be filled by the logic of the balance sheet, not the passion of a creator. The company’s trajectory has been fundamentally altered.

The tremors extend far beyond Automattic’s direct customers. Mullenweg was a co-founder of the original open source WordPress.org project. This is the free software that anyone can download and use to build a website, and it powers an enormous fraction of the internet. Automattic, under Mullenweg, has always been the single biggest corporate contributor to this project, funding developers and infrastructure. A new, purely commercial leadership might view this relationship as a cost centre to be trimmed. They may ask why they are pouring millions of pounds into a free product they do not own. The symbiotic link between the commercial and the open source sides of WordPress, a link embodied by Mullenweg himself, is now in jeopardy.

Everything is uncertain. Users and developers should watch for the board’s next move. The appointment of an interim chief executive will be the first major signal of the new direction. Their background will tell a story. So too will any statements about the company's future commitment, or lack of it, to the open source WordPress project. The board has seized control of the machine. Nobody outside that small room knows exactly what they plan to build with it.

Sources. TechCrunch: Automattic’s board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence. The Verge: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg placed on leave.

Analysis. Drafted with AI assistance from the sources listed above and reviewed by an editor before publication. Jnews links to the organisations it writes about.