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Agree as well he has lost his mind in the battle and does not appear to be trustable in such a competitive market at current state of things (well .. ai).

Probably a good move to move on with someone else that doesn't need to get microdosis at burning man yearly to get ideas.

> He is surely very evidently mentally ill.

I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful.

I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner. I suspect that many people, myself included, would struggle in similar situations.

Occasionally a person can find themselves in a place where quitting is the best option for everyone involved, but the person at the centre is so dug in that they don’t even consider the possibility.

> He is surely very evidently mentally ill.

I agree and upvoted your post. But can I just say that it is super-reddit to diagnose someone based on your B- undergrad psych classes.

We should go back to the classics like "he went off his rocker!", or "he's totally unhinged!" or "completely delulu!"

(of course the people who know, know, and they shouldn't tell you.)

I am saying this as someone who has had repeated and ongoing issues with WP Engine as a hosting platform: no, Matt Mullenweg was not even valid in his basic assumptions motivating his lawsuit against WP Engine. The idea that a hosting platform is leeching off the WordPress ecosystem is absurd, for two reasons:

1. WordPress is free and open source software, developed under reciprocal licensing (GPL). Hosting companies are neither legally nor morally obligated to contribute back to WordPress core. They are already a beneficial part of the ecosystem.

2. WP Engine was contributing back to the WordPress ecosystem, just not Matt Mullenweg's corner of it.

WordPress is a modular platform and plugin and theme developers are just as important to WordPress's continued success as core development is. WP Engine happens to own Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is basically WordPress's answer to the Drupal Fields API[0]. ACF is what lets you add arbitrary fields to WordPress's page edit screen without having to write a bunch of custom metabox hooks and forms. It was a huge timesaver before things moved to page builders[1] and it's still useful even if you're using a page builder.

[0] Formerly Content Construction Kit

[1] Full disclosure: I hate Gutenberg. It is not WordPress, it's a React development kit tumor shoved inside WordPress. Any other page builder would be preferable.

There's no need to diagnose Mullenweg when his behavior could easily be explained by being a run-of-the-mill arrogant asshole.

He never seems to have broken from reality or suffered a mental breakdown. He seems to just treat people (including his employees, customers, and competitors) like garbage who are beneath him.

Had a President make a big ordeal about leaving "for health reasons". His LinkedIn had him at a new company within a couple months doing the same thing.

Had a CISO leave for "personal" reasons. Talked to him a couple years later and yeah, he was fired.

Steal 20$ out of a cash register and make the local news. Waste a billion dollars at a corp and make insane decisions and ride out on a golden parachute. Its a fucked up world.

Barring truly bad behavior this is how executives get fired.

See his other comments in HN in the previous wp “incident”, simply said he _is_ nut

Executives do not get fired like other employees. They have contracts that usually prevent standard dismissal unless they have done something illegal. When they are 'fired', they are still a protected class. Hence the narrative spin: a new 'ceremonial' role, spending time with family, etc. etc.

Make no mistake, he has been fired. It just looks different than a call with HR or a manager and office security telling you to pack up your $hit and leave.

Those phrases often imply that they were fired or asked to resign - although the deniability can be useful, which is why they’re so often used. As a recent example, Fidji Simo went on leave from her role at OpenAI several months before leaving. Although I don’t know for sure, I would suppose that she was essentially fired when she went on leave, and the subsequent success of Codex after she went on leave confirmed the decision to fire her. It’s possible that, if Codex hadn’t been a success, she might have been brought back, so putting her on leave was useful for optionality.

Spend more time with my family :).

Firing a CEO makes your company look bad. Even if you are firing them, you don't say you're firing them.

Like sama? (Hope I don't get dang'ed for being political, especially against a ycombi founder...)

I have seen way too many people in my surroundings go off their rockers after too many ayahuasca trips, especially if they do it in a short time frame, they get emotionally unregulated.

Well shit. I'm a huge fan of the band Artic Monkeys but I know nothing about festival guides. Is there a connection?

Maybe he forgot to submit his PTO into Workday.

The unfortunate part is that he became someone you’re happy to see out. I think he’s absolutely become a net negative for Wordpress, but that wasn’t always the case.

it just sucks to see someone who helped popularize something so many people care about change (at least publicly) for the worse.

Unfortunate this was the result of 23 years, not unfortunate it's happening.

The biggest one was probably 2 years back, the dispute with WP Engine, a hosting provider for WordPress. He used WordPress infrastructure to force all instances hosted there to break, then removed the extensions they built from the plugin store, and then replaced them under the exact same name and identifier with his own.

He then went on this site, and placed incriminating comments under posts discussing that, without discussing it with his lawyers. These comments were then of course used in subsequent lawsuits, which so far he's been losing.

He then also told his employees that if they didn't agree with his actions, they could leave with a severance package, which then had 10% of his employees quit.

The whole WP engine thing. I think it’s private equity buying a wordpress thing, but things got weird and it starting getting bad press. There was the hijacking of a plugin from them if I recall among other things (checkbox in login saying you weren’t affiliated with Wpengine)

Talking to a few Wordpress consultants they were getting questions from their clients which isn’t good.

Matt has seemed erratic from a casual outside view. If he’s having issues hope he pulls it together. The WP community is pretty good.

Any reason needed?!? We can all see what he’s done!

He got tired of WPEngine not contributing back to wordpress, so he made it his mission to try and get them to pitch in.

"Unfortunately", because Matt did a lot of good for the internet over the past two decades. WordCamp is (or was) really amazing, the community he built is really great, the Automattic Lounge was cool, he's donated millions of dollars to good causes, and WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet.

He read the commit logs and understood much of what he read. That's deep understanding of the product. That alone puts him in the top few percent of CEOs.

IMO.

Yeah, it's unfortunate when anyone goes off the deep end.

He still contributed a lot to the world during the good times.

Classicpress may be worth checking out.

https://www.classicpress.net/

Am I looking at the right thing?

https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash

> EmDash depends on Dynamic Workers to run secure sandboxed plugins. Dynamic Workers are currently only available on paid accounts. Upgrade your account (starting at $5/mo) or comment out the worker_loaders block of your wrangler.jsonc configuration file to disable plugins.

Seems like a pretty poor replacement for WordPress, which will run on pretty much whatever random system happens to be within eyesight.

A CMS that can only run on one hosting provider?

Firing the board is the least Matt-like option. He has absolute control and ownership over the WordPress project, I think it is more likely that he starts his own Automattic splinter company and removes Automattic from the WordPress project. I’d guess he is already filing incorporation docs for Antimatter Inc. or some other Matt themed name.

In most venture-backed companies no, because board seats are one of the things you give major investors in exchange for their money.

In this case? Possibly! Ann Dunwoody and Sue Decker look like independents, and he might be able to unilaterally replace either or both of them.

If he's lost the confidence of the board and does that, how much is his company worth?

If Mullenweg attempts to fire the board that just suspended him, he would be weaponizing proxy votes against the very investors who originally granted them. While founder proxies are often structured to be irrevocable, using them to purge the board would almost certainly trigger a massive legal battle, attempts by investors to breach or revoke the proxy agreements, and severe financial instability for the company.

While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board, executing that move would ignite a corporate civil war rather than a clean transition of power.

Hope you’re doing better these days!

Regardless of who he puts on the board, directors have legal obligations to the SEC and all shareholders. If he wants that level of control he would need to take the company private, and various investor agreements probably prevent this.

How is the WPEngine case going anyways?

Glancing at the docket [1] in an attempt to answer this myself... looks like the trial is scheduled for a bit over a year from now [2].. A ton of fighting over discovery... a motion asking for fairly monster sanctions for spoilation of evidence [3] (to be argued on the 30th). Claiming in [3] with what appear to be pretty solid receipts (as far as we can see through the redactions anyways) that Matt was willfully destroying communications related to the case and subject to the discovery - and Automattic's lawyers lied to the court that they preserved them (naturally Automattic's lawyers have a reply with an entirely different interpretation of events if you go look for it... but at least at a glance WPEngine seems more convincing).

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/wpengine-inc-v...

[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

[3] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

Just side note that AI is not destroying one of the largest e-commerce platform, Woocommerce on top of Wordpress.

Touché, reworded it to be clearer on what I meant :).

That was my point. My sarcasm mustn’t have come through.

The article linked ( https://www.404media.co/automattic-automatic-trademark-matt-... ) is behind a paywall. But reading https://www.searchenginejournal.com/automattic-disputes-use-... it sounds like the claim 'Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic"' might not be accurate.

404 Media usually has fairly shoddy journalism. Take everything they say with a grain of salt.

I'm not convinced that sort of legacy lock in exists in the web space. It moves fast and its value is in the content. In the age of AI, migrating that data makes it trivial to move away from a risky platform. I cut my development teeth on WP and managed some fairly large sites. There are far more interesting and well developed alternatives out there.

So problem solved? My only criticism is that 1) Mr. Mullenweg should have held tighter controls over the IP and 2) the direction to the community that they are encouraged to use "WP" as a prefix for their business names and products was ultimately a bad one leading to this mess..

WP Engine's "forking" consisted of disabling the revisions feature by default.

As someone who's personally been bitten by this particular WP Engine misfeature, describing this as a "fork" is disingenuous at best. The average Linux distro ships way more out-of-tree changes than WP Engine ever did.