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Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster

90 points mkeeter 1 hour ago 67 comments

minimaxir 1 hour ago | parent

Discussion on the ouster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283

eclipticplane 1 hour ago | parent

I'm just glad to have my last projects off of Wordpress to get to no longer care about drama at Automattic that seems to never end.

autophagian 1 hour ago | parent

Has very little to do with the current brou-ha-ha, but I just realised its “Automattic” because his name is “Matt”. It’s like a veil over the world has been lifted.

layer8 1 hour ago | parent

It feels like I see this comment in every single Automattic thread on HN. :)

vjvjvjvjghv 1 hour ago | parent

That’s fast! It usually takes me decades, if ever, to figure out this stuff. One of the downsides being slightly autistic and taking everything too literal

moritzwarhier 40 minutes ago | parent

Also noticed it because of this comment chain.

Not sure if it makes me autistic though, I mean, companies use wrong spellings all the time to differentiate, so often that I don't give much thought to it any more.

dnautics 40 minutes ago | parent

Hasnt automattic been around for a decade?

dpark 38 minutes ago | parent

Two decades. It was founded in 2005

boothby 23 minutes ago | parent

It has, but I only learned about it when the drama started hitting HN recently. But since I learned about the guy and the company in the same headline I put two and two together right then and there. I've learned some suspicion of founders who name companies after themselves.

rpdillon 14 minutes ago | parent

Yep, still can't get over how I missed the obvious arrow in the FedEx logo (it's embedded between the "E" and "x") for so many years. Super clever!

jb1991 5 minutes ago | parent

Wait until you hear about the Beatles name.

benatkin 56 minutes ago | parent

Y combinator helped people notice it when they invested in a company called Automatic https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/automatic However now that it's been acquired that reminder of Automattic not being named Automatic is gone.

Hamuko 47 minutes ago | parent

At least his egotrips make a bit more sense after you realise it.

brandall10 38 minutes ago | parent

Someone made the same comment in the thread from a few days back. Yeah, it was the first time I realized it as well.

cwisecarver 31 minutes ago | parent

Relevant: Kumail Nanjiani learns about Automattic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHcrispG_rc

tayloramurphy 10 minutes ago | parent

This is great. I'd never seen this clip before!

JonAtkinson 1 hour ago | parent

This must be exhausting for the Automattic staff who just want to get on with their jobs.

legitster 1 hour ago | parent

Anyone who wanted to get on with their jobs would have taken one of the buyouts. Everyone who still works there has to be committed to Matt.

BobAliceInATree 59 minutes ago | parent

Changing jobs can be rough or maybe even impossible in this job market. I'm sure there are many there that are not aligned with Matt, but just need the steady paycheck. Same was true after Elon took over twitter.

threetonesun 54 minutes ago | parent

Applying the word "impossible" to leaving a white collar job seems like a stretch. Also the buyout was almost 2 years ago now, anyone still there must be either in dire financial straits or quite commited.

paul7986 44 minutes ago | parent

That's until you find yourself in this job market and you realize now how stupid the digital creation job market and overall jobs are. Once you get laid you are now you're in a pile of 100(edit 1000s) other applicants equally qualified vying for the same job and then hundreds of thousands who can all type to Ai to do a job that once required knowledge & skill.

zdragnar 40 minutes ago | parent

Only 100? Those are good odds in the current market...

zimpenfish 37 minutes ago | parent

> Once you get laid you are now you're in a pile of 100 other applicants equally qualified

I'm assuming there should be an "off" after "laid"...

danabrams 15 minutes ago | parent

I don't know, I've had some years where without "off" would also make sense.

legitster 12 minutes ago | parent

The first buyouts happened before the job market fully tanked.

I'm sure there are people who are stuck and have a house payment, but it was pretty obvious the shenanigans were only going to get worse.

Also, if you're just there for a paycheck, you're probably not that upset at distractions.

0gs 36 minutes ago | parent

or they just love wordpress, the product, so much, and believe in it fully. lol

TheRealPomax 33 minutes ago | parent

Or they need the pay. It's all well and good to go "they could just leave" but then what? Spend 6 months looking for a new job only for everyone to go "sorry, the hundreds of thousands of layoffs from every other highly skilled tech workforce beat you to it"?

legitster 1 hour ago | parent

> WordPress founder and a key advocate for the open source community

This should probably say self appointed advocate. He really hasn't advocated for much beyond collecting payments to Automattic.

ibejoeb 16 minutes ago | parent

I don't know... WordPress is a pretty huge open source project and community. He also opened Pocket Casts.

miguelxpn 13 minutes ago | parent

He bought Pocket Casts.

ibejoeb 8 minutes ago | parent

Then released under the MPL

stronglikedan 7 minutes ago | parent

Was it open source before he bought it? If not, then he indeed opened it.

legitster 4 minutes ago | parent

If you followed his months of mad ravings, he made it clear that Wordpress is not a true open source project. He has direct control over the project via Automattic appointments in the community, everything is designed to route through his circuitous network of shell corporations and trademarks (wordpress.org is fully under his control and he personally owns the Wordpress trademark - which the "project" licenses from him).

The only reason Wordpress is open source in the first place is because it's a just a fork of b2/cafelog and the original GNU license means derivative works have to be open source as well. (Lost in his moral crusade against WP Engine is the fact that he never really contributed to b2 besides just taking their code).

bedroom_jabroni 1 hour ago | parent

Damn it hasn't even been a week.

figassis 1 hour ago | parent

Is it perhaps time to ackowledge that boards where everyone is buddies can't actually do their jobs, yet they get paid obscene amounts of money?

iAMkenough 7 minutes ago | parent

No different than how the Cabinet of the United States operates.

xnx 1 hour ago | parent

Does Matt own >50%? If so, the board is irrelevant. If not, I assume he would've been gone long ago.

walrus01 1 hour ago | parent

Doesn't he control 84% of the voting stock or something? I'm curious how a board could even oust him in the first place. Or so he claims.

jsnell 42 minutes ago | parent

The ability to appoint a board member doesn't mean you get to control their every decision. Nor is their fiduciary duty just one shareholder.

Of course usually hand-picked boards don't go against their benefactor, and they're not keeping their seats.

That they did in this case says something about just how bad the situation will be.

everfrustrated 24 minutes ago | parent

Depends on the rules of the company. Just because he can elect the board doesn't mean he gets to direct their every decision. They are supposed to have their own independent judgement.

Depending on the company rules it is possible they might not be easily replaced during their term in which case they could do a coup in the short term.

benatkin 1 hour ago | parent

It would have been just a matter of time before he displayed his power with the nonprofit and wordpress.com which he controls personally, independently of the Automattic board. Maybe that is part of why the board gave him his control of Automattic back so quickly.

VCFundedGenYer 58 minutes ago | parent

When the CEO becomes a diva, the company has lost the plot.

pluc 55 minutes ago | parent

i'm gonna wait to hear it from the people who were saying yesterday they were in control if that's ok

> As of yet, no one at Automattic has heard a confirmation from the board. Mark Davies’ Slack account was also deactivated, sources said.

mhm, ok.

chuckadams 45 minutes ago | parent

Davies was supposedly the one who originally cooked up the whole extortion scheme against major players in the WP space. WPE was just the first target of many that were planned. Not that Matt is absolved in any way, but it'll be interesting to see what falls out if and when he throws Davies under the bus.

pluc 29 minutes ago | parent

That'd be the first time I hear about that angle. Mullenweg was pretty public about why he was doing it and it never felt like it was someone else's idea, given his level of commitment. It would be smart to find a scapegoat if you want to stretch your tenure a few years though.

ttul 49 minutes ago | parent

Most surprising in this article is the vibrant HDR magenta circle on Matt’s Twitter.

edoceo 9 minutes ago | parent

What does that mean? Why is it a surprise?

sillysaurusx 47 minutes ago | parent

What is it about Automattic's structure that lets Matt stay in control? Even Travis got ousted at Uber, and he was the primary founder. Is the company set up in a way that makes removing Matt very difficult?

manarth 37 minutes ago | parent

He controls roughly 84% of the share-stakeholder votes.

ebilgenius 41 minutes ago | parent

> Mullenweg responded to our inquiry, saying a blog post is forthcoming. When it dropped, it was about him buying a houseboat.

edoceo 11 minutes ago | parent

Not a good investment.

WesolyKubeczek 10 minutes ago | parent

It's easily the quote of the month. And we are only halfway into the month.

pluc 5 minutes ago | parent

From yesterday:

> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.”

throwawaymatt 41 minutes ago | parent

Just when we (the WP community) thought things were settling down and cooler heads might be prevailing... this happens. Uhg, not great for someone who has invested over 15 years into building with WP and does (paid) business with an Automattic company.

mpweiher 30 minutes ago | parent

Time for alternatives?

raverbashing 24 minutes ago | parent

Makes me wonder if he really is back or the board just "forgot" to take his account offline

testycool 34 minutes ago | parent

Did someone make a site to track the timeline of the new WordPress situation, like they did with the WP Engine one?

wmf 8 minutes ago | parent

It's all the same situation. https://mullenweg.wtf/

dbg31415 17 minutes ago | parent

Directus is great. And free for small organizations and non-profits.

Just saying, there are plenty of good CMSs out there now.

WordPress is junky AF, and the spat with WP Engine over... of all things... how they store backups... it was all so cringe. Felt like it boiled down to WP Engines saying, "We don't need to keep backups on the live server..." And WP saying, "Oh hell yeah you do, you can't have your own way to do rollbacks!" It was literally insane for them to fight about that.

CodeWriter23 12 minutes ago | parent

What an absolute clown show. I don't see how anyone can trust WordPress (the company) going forward.

martin_drapeau 9 minutes ago | parent

What relevance will WP have now that AI can build websites? I see more and more vertical SaaS vendors bundling website migration/building/hosting in their offering. I suspect they may steel away many customers from WP, Wix and competitors. What do you think?

addaon 7 minutes ago | parent

One challenge is that if everyone uses AI to build their own websites, the security vulnerabilities will be different per site, which is very inconvenient if you want to compromise a huge number of sites simultaneously. It's possible that AI tools for exploiting websites scale to overcome this challenge, but it's going to be hard for AI to compete with Wordpress for security vulnerability density, uniformity, and cost.

martin_drapeau 3 minutes ago | parent

Sure but a SaaS vendor already handle security for their own products which are typically dynamic website apps. I agree security is a concern for clients doing it themselves.