WordPress's Founder Returned to the Top of Automattic Three Days After the Board Vote: "I'm a Pirate Now"

The board of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, this week removed founder Matt Mullenweg as chief executive and placed him on paid leave. On Saturday, a little after 5pm Eastern time, the same company issued a statement saying Mullenweg was back in his post - and that he had the board's full support. Between those two statements lay several days in which it was entirely unclear who was actually running the company.

The sequence of events is worth reading slowly. The board voted for the leave without stating a reason. Mullenweg responded on the company's internal Slack, accusing board members of "conspiring" against him. On Wednesday Automattic confirmed he was "currently on leave" and that chief financial officer Mark Davies would run the firm on an interim basis, with the board's full confidence.

Then the plan fell apart

Mullenweg simply did not leave. According to several sources, he kicked the other administrators off the company's Slack and told employees everything was sorted and that he was back in command. In one message he wrote: "I'm a pirate now." Asked whether the statements about his return were serious, he promised a blog post - and the post that arrived was about buying a houseboat. Asked whether he was merely joking, he replied: "I'm not a troll, I'm a pirate, obviously." On X he noted this was probably the fifth time he had faced a "coup" at his own company.

The statement about his return did not come from him - it came from a spokesperson, with a line that Mullenweg is chairman and chief executive with the board's full support and that "if you search online, you will see many senior leaders and employees at Automattic who support him". The reference to online support points to posts on X that Mullenweg had been sharing from his own account. A company worth billions proves its chief executive's legitimacy by reposting.

What remains unclear

Automattic did not answer questions on Friday, nor reports that board member Toni Schneider had stepped down. Schneider is Automattic's former chief executive and now runs Bluesky; he replied neither to personal email nor via Bluesky. The composition of the board, according to sources, is still not a finished story.

That is the part that matters beyond the personal drama. When a founder can survive a board vote by kicking the administrators out of Slack and holding out for three days, the question is not who won - it is what a board's vote actually means at a company where the founder holds the keys to everything. WordPress underpins around 40 percent of the world's internet. Governance of the firm that maintains it should not depend on who changes the passwords first.