The board found its edge

Fifty minutes. That is how long Matt Mullenweg says he had between receiving the board resolution and the meeting that passed it. On Wednesday Automattic's board voted to put its founder on paid leave against his will, named CFO Mark Davies interim CEO, and declined his request for a few hours to have counsel read the paperwork. He told every employee about it on Slack, by name, before the company had a statement.

The interesting sentence in the story is not his. It came an hour or so later from Mary Hubbard, executive director of the open-source project, in a message to the WordPress.org community:

Read that as a governance diagram and it says the quiet part. The board of the company can remove the man from the company. It cannot remove him from the project, because the project was never inside the company. The board just found the edge of its own jurisdiction, and it stops well short of WordPress.

This is not a nuance. It is the whole structure. Automattic is a venture-backed corporation with a board, a CFO, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Pocket Casts, and roughly 43% of the web's CMS market riding on its flagship. The WordPress trademark belongs to the WordPress Foundation, which Mullenweg set up and chairs, and which licenses the mark to Automattic. WordPress.org, the site that ships every core release, hosts every plugin, and pushes updates to every install, is his personally. He said as much in 2024, during the fight with WP Engine, when he cut the hosting company off from wordpress.org and clarified that the site was not Automattic's to run. It was his.

That arrangement was built to keep the commons out of the company's hands. For twenty years the pitch to contributors was exactly that: the money lives in Automattic, the project lives with the community, and one person straddles both so the two never drift. On Wednesday the straddle became the point. Four directors, including Toni Schneider, who ran the company before Mullenweg took the CEO seat back, decided he should not be running it. The mechanism that protects WordPress from Automattic now protects Mullenweg from Automattic's board.

The mechanism that protects WordPress from Automattic now protects Mullenweg from Automattic's board.

The fair objection is that this is how open source is supposed to work. A BDFL is not an employee. Linus does not answer to the Linux Foundation's board, and nobody thinks that is a scandal. Guido stepped down from Python on his own schedule. Founders of projects outlive founders of companies, and the separation is the feature. Grant all of it. The difference is that Linux does not have a single company whose product is the project, whose contributors are on that company's payroll, and whose CEO decides which competitors get to download updates. WordPress does. The thing that makes Mullenweg untouchable by his board is the same thing that let him deactivate contributor accounts over a rumored fork, and the community's only recourse in either case is the one it has always had: fork, and lose the name, the plugin directory, and the update channel on the way out.

So the next few weeks are a test with a clean readout. Davies runs the company that funds the project. Mullenweg runs the project the company depends on. Neither can fire the other. If that works, it is because Mullenweg lets it, which means the board did not remove a founder so much as negotiate with one. If it does not work, the lever is the same one WP Engine met: who wordpress.org serves and who it doesn't.

Fifty minutes was enough to take the company. It was never going to be enough to take WordPress. The board knew that going in. Everyone who builds on the platform should know it now.