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- Hacker News
- He who controls the Slack, controls the (Wordpress) universe.by paulbjensen
- a ban for a ban makes the whole world permabannedby pwillia7
- So glad I just converted my site to Hugo.. happy to get away from this whole bunch of people.
- This title would benefit from editorializing “of Automattic” for those who do not follow the daily drama this individual has created.
ETA: Or better yet a clearer statement that nothing about this is clear.
by fn-mote - So he was on a leave of absense, and now is no longer on such a leave? This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense, but they give no evidence of that in the article. I saw it suggested that he usually has wild ideas after returning from burning man, and the board wanted to insulate the company from the effects of that. That he's now back is evidence for a theory along those lines, and contradicts a theory that the board was trying to get rid of him. But I have no insight beyond that.by f33d5173
- > This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense
Way more are than we are told about.
by DANmode - Do you think his leave of absence was for one day?by wmf
- It surprises me to no end that people continue working for this lunatic. When this company was offering an early severance, I am surprised only 159 took the offer [1]. Per cited article, this was 8.4% of the total workforce. Apparently there was even a second severance offer at around the same time of the CEO's legal fight with WP Engine [2].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/159-employees-are-leaving-...
[2] https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-ma...
by xyst - I can't help but read this and be reminded of what Steve Albini said about refusing a major label contract with Big Black:
> If you don't use contracts, you don't have any contracts to worry about. If you don't have a tour rider, you don't have a tour rider to argue about. If you don't have a booking agent, you don't have a booking agent to argue with.
> To us, every moment we remained unfettered and in control was a success. We never had a manager. We never had a booking agent. We never had a lawyer. We never took an advance from a record company. We booked our own tours, paid our own bills, made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences. The results of that methodology speak for themselves: Nobody ever told us what to do, and nobody took any of our money.
If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.
by achenet - He also didn't make a living, and record companies took his style and used it to generate billions. His income came from his studio, production work, and being a celebrity.
I was just having a discussion about this with a friend who watched an NYU hosted debate in the 90s between the guy I can't remember from Sick Of It All and Sam McPheeters from Born Against. Born Against had been trolling Sick Of It All for ages (because it was fun), putting up posters, passing out fliers around their shows and talking about them for signing to a major label and distributor, and especially for censoring their lyric sheet in order to get sold at Walmart. Born Against was traditional DIY, on Sam's record label (Vermiform), didn't have bar codes on their records, mostly mailorder, etc.
Both were right, McPheeters was right that Sick Of It All had sold out and censored themselves in order to fit into corporate commerce, but the guy from Sick Of It All was more right. His position was that Born Against (like a Steve Albini) were rich middle class kids who were just having fun, and Sick Of It All were from working class families that they had to support. Music can be the most important thing for hobbyists, but that kind of music is just music. They on the other hand were looking for a ticket to a better life, and one that allowed them to do what they were good at and what they enjoyed.
So Born Against and their style ended up aped by the corporations, and spreads into emocore and all that shit, makes the companies billions, and Sam McPheeters ends up with zero of that. He's fine, he's writing columns for the Atlantic and doing interviews with NPR (incidentally because wealthy people pay to be close to "cool" people.) Meanwhile the style of music represented by Sick Of It All pretty much runs its course, but the members pocket a bunch of cash, and get to move on to do whatever else they want.
Purity is a privilege of the already wealthy. A lot of people chose Wordpress because it was the cheapest functional option (Free.) They were not interested in writing their own CMS, and couldn't afford to anyway.
> If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.
Also in respect to Mullenweg, afaik he owns 84% of the company. This never had a chance without his consent.
by pessimizer - I only see the headlines of this drama. All it tells me is to stay far away from any dependency on this company.by largbae
- In 2010 WordPress seemed like important technology. It wasn’t perfect, was a big and fruitful hacking target, but it had been built and refined and had a big ecosystem.
I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP.
Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?
by xp84 - Definitely stay away from anything Matt Mullenweg is involved in. Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.by dlcarrier
- I don't say this lightly, but this sounds like someone going through a mental health crisis.by bawolff
- > someone going through a mental health crisis
Or coming down from amphetamines.
- all the oligarchs are doing it these days
- No, he's just an assholeby xyst
- I hope someone eventually does a deep-dive on the organizational structure of WordPress and how much of a mess it is.
As someone that’s pretty much worked in/with WP for my entire career, it’s always seemed like the worst of both worlds - distributed and slow-moving, yet still ultimately controlled to a massive extent by a single individual.
These kinds of absurd situations just slowly push people toward Shopify, other CMSes, etc. There will be no grand exodus, because too many companies are intertwined to the WP ecosystem. But combined with AI, the horrible design of Gutenberg, and half a dozen other things, I really worry for the future of WP. At this point I generally only recommend it to people that need something extremely customized. Other platforms are easier to use and don’t have the soap opera drama.
by keiferski - oh yeah, Shopify isn't also ultimately controlled by a single individual /s. Try Solidus for something controlled by a community!
- Recent and related:
Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 - Sept 2026 (144 comments)
Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283 - Sept 2026 (372 comments)
(I know there have been many other threads in this long saga but I don't have the time (or the stomach) to try to list them)
p.s. We merged an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683265) into this one, which is why the timestamps of some of the comments are older.
by dang - Maybe the headline should be edited. Right now, those who see only the headline are misled into believing that he has "returned as CEO," when evidence can only confirm that he is in control of the company's official communication channels.by rideontime
- It does sound as if he has lost his grip on reality.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.”
And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.
by BLKNSLVR - you don’t get it he is quirkyby moomoo11
- Seems pretty tame compared to the antics of the richest person on the planet, perhaps trolling is the new normal.
- I’ve been around the WP crowd enough to know countless stories that prove mm is basically a manual case of narcissistic personality disorder. The reality shifting, the constant blaming, the unsubstantiated claims… they could put his picture on the DSM5 definition of the disorder. The problem with these personalities is that they are untreatable and tend to get way worse with power/money. He is an utter and catastrophic disgrace to the whole wordpress community and the only hope is that he gets to be successfully ousted.
- The additional reporting at [0] about his alleged behaviour in internal channels along with his public posts on social media really reinforces this same feeling for me:
> “oh, since I’m a pirate now, I fucking curse. after 42 years of never uttering a curse word, it’s kinda fucking fun. if this is a HR problem @caron please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with @Mark Davies.” […] Mullenweg also posted that the Automattic Slack “smells funny, like turncoats” and said he was going to hang out in the WordPress.org Slack instead.
Good luck to everyone in the blast radius.
[0] https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-swears-for-th...
by csnover - We need to go back to a time when a CEO 'trolling' or acting like this would be career suicide. It seems like half of the biggest tech companies are run by people with the emotional and social intelligence of 3 years olds.by basisword
- I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.by TJSomething
- There's an episode of Archer where Archer and another dude have to battle to the death to determine who the new pirate king is.
Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat?
by nosioptar - Seems like nobody is actually reading the TFA which is a shame because what the article describes is truly mind boggling:
>However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic
What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.
by glenstein