Matt Mullenweg regains control of Automattic after a boardroom revolt that lasted, by the company’s own count, 33 hours and 20 minutes. Early on Friday morning, the WordPress founder posted a message to the company’s internal Slack: ‘(Don’t call it a comeback…) Howdy everybody! Happy to announce the board is back in agreement, and I’m in control of Automattic.’
He appended a link to LL Cool J’s ‘Mama Said Knock You Out.’ The humour was deliberate; the circumstances behind it were anything but light.
How Mullenweg Regains Control of Automattic: The Voting-Share Advantage
The episode exposed a structural reality that the board appears to have underestimated. Mullenweg controls 84% of Automattic’s voting shares, a fact he disclosed publicly at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. That concentration of voting power gave him the leverage to reconstitute the board once he decided to use it.
In a subsequent message to staff, he was precise about what that meant in practice: ‘For purposes of Delaware law, I am the CEO, President, Treasurer, and Secretary,’ TechCrunch reported.
The board that voted to remove him no longer exists in the same form. Mullenweg removed General Ann Dunwoody, accepted the resignations of Toni Schneider and Sue Decker, and let go of chief financial officer Mark Davies and chief legal officer Andy Missan. In their place, he named a new board that includes science-fiction author Hugh Howey and two co-founders of the now-defunct social app IRL, according to The Next Web.
A Board That Moved Fast, and a CEO Who Moved Faster
The sequence began on Wednesday, when Mullenweg told his team via Slack that three board members, Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker, had voted alongside Davies to place him on paid leave. He wrote that he received the board resolution only 50 minutes before the meeting and was denied time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, The Repository reported.
Schneider, notably, had previously served as Automattic’s CEO from 2006 to 2014 and currently leads Bluesky. Davies was installed as interim CEO, a fact Automattic confirmed at the time.
Between the ouster and the reversal, Mullenweg’s behaviour on public platforms was erratic enough to leave observers uncertain about what was genuine and what was performance. He removed all Slack admins from the company’s workspace and made a post about being a ‘pirate’ that included profanity, unusual for someone known not to swear. On X, he posted ‘Things are different than they appear’ and solicited sysadmins and security researchers to help him migrate personal assets away from Automattic’s infrastructure, even as he expressed support for Davies. On Reddit, he told those speculating about the implications for the open-source community that they ‘didn’t know what they were talking about.’
By Friday morning, the tone had shifted. ‘Boards are never boring,’ he posted on X, followed by a laughing-crying emoji.
At the time of his initial Slack message, no board confirmation had reached staff independently. Davies’ Slack account had been deactivated.
Silver Lake, WP Engine, and a Company Under Financial Strain
Throughout the episode, Mullenweg suggested that Silver Lake, the private equity firm that is the majority owner of web-hosting company WP Engine, was involved in efforts to ‘destroy’ his life. WP Engine filed suit against Automattic and Mullenweg on 2 October 2024 in California federal court, case 4:24-cv-06917. Automattic’s counterclaims allege that Silver Lake had been seeking to sell WP Engine at a $2 billion valuation but could not find a buyer, including after making overtures to Automattic itself, and that WP Engine degraded its product quality to cut costs after Silver Lake invested $250 million.
The financial backdrop to all of this is uncomfortable. BlackRock’s semi-annual SEC filing for its Science and Technology Trust (BST) and Science and Technology Term Trust (BSTZ), dated 30 June 2026, values Automattic shares at approximately $14.33 per share. That represents an 83% decline from BlackRock’s entry price of $85 per share during Automattic’s $288 million Series E round in 2021, when the company was valued at $7.5 billion, according to The Repository.
Before the ouster, the company had already offered employees who disagreed with its direction an exit package of either six months’ pay or $30,000, TechRadar reported. The internal tensions that prompted that offer have not been resolved by a change of board composition.
Mullenweg has been CEO since 2014 and founded the company in 2003, the year after co-creating WordPress. He said a blog post explaining the past 48 hours was forthcoming. The WP Engine lawsuit, meanwhile, continues before Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin. That case, not the board, may yet prove the harder fight to resolve.
