The Automattic board ouster that upended the WordPress parent company last week has concluded decisively: the three directors who voted to place chief executive Matt Mullenweg on paid leave are gone, and Mullenweg has replaced them with an entirely new set of faces. Mullenweg was away from the helm for just 33 hours and 20 minutes, according to a statement from an Automattic spokesperson issued after midnight on Sunday. By Saturday the company had confirmed he was back. By Monday, sources said, an internal announcement about the reconstituted board was expected. The Automattic Board Ouster and What Followed The three…
Author: Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi spent a decade in corporate banking and fintech before moving to business journalism. She started in trade finance at a major UK bank, moved to a payments company scaling into African markets, and spent her last role leading partnerships at a cross-border remittance platform. She writes about business strategy, fintech, digital banking, and the corporate news that moves markets. She is interested in how companies actually make money rather than how they describe making money in investor presentations. Funke lives in South London. She reads earnings calls the way other people listen to podcasts, and finds them about as reliable.
The Insight Partners diversification strategy has become a quiet point of distinction in a venture market where a handful of firms are staking enormous proportions of their new funds on OpenAI and Anthropic alone. Deven Parekh, who has co-run the firm for 26 years, sat down with TechCrunch at a StrictlyVC event in New York and was unusually candid about what that discipline looks like in practice, including the deals Insight lost, the ones it won bigger than expected, and why he thinks the math of extreme concentration simply does not work over time. The Case Against Betting the Farm…
Barack Obama used a Democratic fundraising event in Manhattan last week to press his party on the Obama Democrats AI plan question that he says can no longer wait: how does government get ahead of a technology moving fast in private hands, before the risks become irreversible? The former president spoke alongside House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the New-York Historical Society, in an event organised by the campaign arm of House Democrats. The two spoke for nearly an hour in front of party donors and lawmakers, according to four people familiar with the gathering. Jeffries asked Obama directly how…
Three top dividend stock picks are drawing fresh buy calls from Wall Street analysts: midstream giant Energy Transfer (ET), Permian Basin producer Permian Resources (PR), and utility holding company Sempra (SRE). Each offers a different yield profile and a different reason to believe the income will hold. Energy Transfer: Record Volumes and a Raised Guidance Bar Energy Transfer operates roughly 140,000 miles of pipelines across 44 states. Its Q2 2026 quarterly cash distribution of $0.34 per common unit ($1.36 annualised) was, according to the company’s own Energy Transfer Q2 2026 earnings release, its nineteenth consecutive quarterly payout at that level…
The Mullenweg Automattic board ouster lasted, in the end, just 33 hours and 20 minutes. By Saturday evening, Automattic had issued a statement confirming that Matt Mullenweg was back as chairman and CEO, with what it called the full support of the board. ‘Matt Mullenweg is the chairman and CEO of Automattic, with full support of the board and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well,’ a company spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. The speed of the reversal made the episode look less like a managed leadership transition and more like…
Anthropic’s plan to deploy embedded AI evaluators inside its own offices moved from commitment to contract on 18 September 2026, when the company announced a formal partnership with Accenture to begin the work it had promised in chief executive Dario Amodei’s essay, ‘We Must Pace the Frontier.’ Anthropic will fund Accenture’s work directly. The announcement gives institutional shape to what had been a rhetorical commitment. In his essay, Amodei outlined three broad strategies for slowing AI’s advance: embedded third-party evaluators operating inside frontier labs, voluntary coordination between AI companies in democratic countries, and a push for global agreements with authoritarian…
The Precision Castparts valuation debate just received a very large data point. When GE Aerospace announced it would pay $11.75 billion to acquire Consolidated Precision Products (CPP), one of the few meaningful competitors to Berkshire Hathaway’s industrial castings unit, it handed analysts a live comparable transaction with which to reprice a business Warren Buffett once admitted he had overpaid for.The arithmetic is unflattering for Berkshire’s share price, even if it flatters Buffett’s original conviction.What the CPP Deal RevealsGE Aerospace is funding the acquisition with $7 billion in cash and the remainder through new debt, and says the deal does not…
The Mecka AI Sequoia valuation of roughly $500 million is still being finalised, but the fundraising trajectory of this two-year-old startup tells a story that goes well beyond one pending term sheet. Three months after closing a $60 million Series A, the New York-based motion-data company is in advanced talks with Sequoia Capital for a new round that would more than triple its last disclosed post-money mark. According to Dealroom, Mecka AI’s June 2026 follow-on closed at a $140 million post-money valuation. The Sequoia-led deal, if it closes near the reported figure, would represent roughly a 3.6x step-up in a…
Alger Spectra Fund performance over the past two years has placed the $4.5 billion vehicle in the top 4% of its category in 2023 and the top 2% in 2024, a run that traces back, in the most direct way, to a chance meeting in a Midtown hotel on the morning of 11 September 2001. Daniel Chung, the 64-year-old chief executive and chief investment officer of Fred Alger Management, had gone to the InterContinental Hotel that morning to hear a company executive present. He was running late and went straight from there. When a note was passed to the presenter…
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…
