Hacker News

Holy shit. You are, if anything, underselling the article.

> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.” Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.”

And like all well-run companies, it's not clear who the ceo is.

That company sounds like a clusterfuck. Good luck attracting good talent with such dysfunctional leadership.

I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.

There's an episode of Archer where Archer and another dude have to battle to the death to determine who the new pirate king is.

Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat?

The additional reporting at [0] about his alleged behaviour in internal channels along with his public posts on social media really reinforces this same feeling for me:

> “oh, since I’m a pirate now, I fucking curse. after 42 years of never uttering a curse word, it’s kinda fucking fun. if this is a HR problem @caron please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with @Mark Davies.” […] Mullenweg also posted that the Automattic Slack “smells funny, like turncoats” and said he was going to hang out in the WordPress.org Slack instead.

Good luck to everyone in the blast radius.

[0] https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-swears-for-th...

you don’t get it he is quirky

Do you think his leave of absence was for one day?

In 2010 WordPress seemed like important technology. It wasn’t perfect, was a big and fruitful hacking target, but it had been built and refined and had a big ecosystem.

I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP.

Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?

Definitely stay away from anything Matt Mullenweg is involved in. Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.

Kumail Nanjiani learning what Automattic is: https://youtu.be/5Y64UeNeiOM?t=74

It took me quite a while to "get" the "Arby's" restaurant name.

Did you know that Adidas was founded by Adolf "Adi" Dassler?

A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).

I can’t help but think that’s because they don’t know any better and maybe because they’re getting better informed by the reporting than what they’re actually getting from management.

Which would be terrible if true.

He can vote in a replacement board. The board knew that any action they took was temporary, and likely planned around this from the start.

an esoteric club perhaps, given half of these folks are imaginary?

> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.

Ianal but I don't think the laws care about governing structure of corps. You can start a new corp and run it democratically all you want. There are co-ops and other interesting structures out there

Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.

Who do you think pays for the political election campaign theater of all theses "democratic candidates" though?

I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.

> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.

Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy? I think we've seen over an over again which one works and which one doesn't.

It's allowed to do a more democratic business in most countries, it's called a:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

There have been some govts that mandated this type of organization for part of their economy; we usually refer to that as communism.

(no value judgement here, there are day's when I'm quite a commie myself)

> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.

Congratulations you have reinvented communism from first principles! And you are completely correct in your analysis.