Matt Mullenweg has been removed from his role of CEO of Automattic and put on paid leave. The board of directors at the company have replaced him with the Chief Financial Officer Mark Davies. Mullenweg only had 50 minutes advance notice of the vote and his request to have the action reviewed by legal counsel was denied. Ousted.
According to reports, Matt accused the CFO of conspiring behind his back with the board of directors, saying in an internal Slack announcement:
“And the biggest news: I won’t be able to make the ELT tomorrow… I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied…”
WordPress Is On The Back Foot
His ouster comes at a time of strong negative sentiment against Matt Mullenweg because of the disruption he initiated in his dispute with WP Engine.
Automattic faces a lawsuit from WP Engine that directly arises from his actions and a motion for sanctions that accuses Mullenweg of destroying or failing to preserve evidence. According to reports, Jonathan Robins (Automattic’s e-discovery vendor), claimed that Mullenweg’s laptop and a phone were unaccounted for.
The fallout from Mullenweg’s self-described “nuclear” war against WP Engine goes far beyond the lawsuit against him and Automattic, it has also resulted in the declining WordPress marketshare of content management systems (CMS) and steadily declining attendance at WordCamp, the WordPress community’s conference series.
All of this comes at a time a of a painful slow-motion decline of the WordPress plugin ecosystem where many plugin developers are seeing their paid user base declining and an increase in the discovery of vulnerabilities, both due to AI.
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