Since Automattic’s board forced him on leave and installed CFO Mark Davies as interim CEO on Wednesday, Matt Mullenweg has posted a hiring call for sysadmins and security researchers, broken a 42-year streak of not swearing, fired off posts on X about evidence destruction in the WP Engine lawsuit, and shown up on Reddit and Hacker News to engage with critics.
He also posted in the WordPress Slack #announcements channel to reassure the community: “Howdy everyone, I’m fine. Still catching up with messages and everything, sorry for being a bit slow responding. Thank you for all the support.”
When I reached out to ask if he’d like to comment publicly, he simply replied: “oh yeah, just wait and watch 🙂”
“Since I’m a pirate now, I fucking curse”
According to sources, Mullenweg got “a bit loose” in Automattic’s Slack.
After Chief Systems Wrangler Barry Abrahamson — an Automattic veteran who joined in its first year and has worked closely with Mullenweg ever since — posted a message about the situation, Mullenweg reacted with a “FUCK” emoji and a “YOU TOO” emoji. The response is unusual given Mullenweg’s longstanding aversion to profanity. In a 2015 interview with Tim Ferriss, he said he didn’t swear because he preferred to find better ways to express himself.
And then things got really weird when he posted another message, according to multiple sources:
“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 signed off as “MM.” The “@caron” he was referring to was Caron Macmillan, Automattic’s Chief People Officer.
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.
For a brief period in WordPress Slack, a pirate flag emoji appeared next to Mullenweg’s name.
“I really need some great sysadmin and security researchers”
On X, Mullenweg posted a call for “great sysadmin and security researchers to hire really quick, no one from @automattic.”
“I’m on the board there and fully support Mark Davies in his interim CEO role,” he wrote. “But I think it’s probably good if I move some of my stuff currently hosted there, elsewhere.”
The post set off immediate speculation about what “my stuff” means. Mullenweg personally owns the WordPress.org domain and its underlying infrastructure — a fact that emerged during the WP Engine litigation and surprised much of the community, which had long assumed it belonged to the nonprofit WordPress Foundation.
In Post Status Slack, Patchstack CEO Oliver Sild was among the first to flag the implications. “You wouldn’t hire security researchers and sysadmins to migrate a simple personal website,” he wrote. “And he has said that wordpress.org is his personal website.”
Sild said he hoped it was a power play to make the Automattic board “consider the associated risk” of separating Mullenweg from the company. Others were less optimistic. “If .org infra is still on a8c servers then Matt can’t block WPE access when he feels like it,” wrote Chris Reynolds, Senior Developer Advocate at Pantheon, referencing Mullenweg’s October 2024 decision to block WP Engine from accessing the plugin directory — a move the US district court later ordered him to reverse, and which remains subject to a preliminary injunction.
Computerworld took the question to enterprise analysts, including Frank Dickson of Dickson Research, who pointed out that the change in Automattic’s leadership doesn’t mean much as long as Mullenweg still fully controls WordPress.org.
“The part of WordPress that actually keeps enterprise IT up at night isn’t Automattic’s org chart. It’s WordPress.org, the plugin and theme directory every WordPress site pulls its security updates from, and the WordPress trademark,” Dickson told Computerworld.
“Mullenweg owns and controls both personally, outside of Automattic, and nothing about this week’s vote touches that. He also remains a director on Automattic’s board. The company changed who runs its hosting business without changing who controls the distribution pipeline millions of those hosted sites still depend on.”
Melody Brue, analyst-in-residence at Moor Insights & Strategy, speculated on the reasoning behind the board’s decision, telling Computerworld that Mullenweg’s removal as CEO suggested the board was trying to sidestep something serious.
“It has to be some exposure or risk that was severe enough that speed outweighed any optics or fairness. Boards don’t generally move that abruptly,” she said, adding that the appointment of Davies, the company’s CFO, as interim CEO “definitely shows some stabilization and possibly some legal compliance cleanup. What it doesn’t say is renewed product investment.”
Matt Medeiros from The WP Minute raised a similar concern on his YouTube channel, noting that Davies’ Slack messages to staff were “very corporate” and warning that WordPress doesn’t have “the time to rebound.”
Mullenweg didn’t respond to a follow-up message from The Repository asking whether he’d found anyone to hire.
Spoliation, Signal, and the September 30 hearing
On X, Mullenweg devoted a string of posts to the spoliation allegations in the WP Engine case — a discovery fight that has been going on for months.
WP Engine has accused Mullenweg of destroying evidence, alleging his WhatsApp and Signal messages went uncaptured for 20 months and that two of his personal devices went missing. Automattic has pushed back, arguing no relevant messages were lost. A sanctions hearing is scheduled for September 30.
Mullenweg posted that WP Engine’s lawyers “have a pretty good chance of getting a judge to say I spoiled evidence in a malicious way trying to hide something.” He continued, in all caps: “Which is extra funny if you actually know me, because I WRITE CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS TO SAVE EVERYTHING.”
He tagged Beeper — the messaging app Automattic acquired in 2024 — writing: “AND HAVE SPENT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS ON TECHNOLOGY THAT SYNCHRONIZES ALL YOUR MESSAGING PLATFORMS ONTO ALL YOUR DEVICES.” One of Mullenweg’s stated life goals on his website is to democratize messaging.
He acknowledged his September 2024 tweet encouraging people to send him tips via Signal with disappearing messages — a post that has become central to WP Engine’s spoliation claims. “One of my (many) weaknesses is I actually want to be a journalist, so I was trying to cosplay like my late best friend @Om and set up a tip line,” he wrote. “But it’s actually against the law to have disappearing messages when you have a preservation order.”
He also posted about The Repository’s spoliation coverage, calling it the top story “for weeks” even as WordPress shipped major releases.
He went on to warn that “the next step in this playbook is to restart the smear attacks, so get ready for some National Enquirer rumors or hit pieces,” referencing his 2024 claims that WP Engine was running a smear campaign against him.
In a separate thread, Mullenweg re-shared his original blog post attacking WP Engine and his September 2024 WordCamp US keynote where he attacked Silver Lake and WP Engine onstage. Of WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner and Silver Lake co-CEO Lee Wittlinger, he wrote: “I would love their faces to be some of the most famous and recognized in the world. Every coffee shop they go into. Every time they buy a croissant, or ice cream.”
Community reaction
The community response has split along the same fault lines that emerged two years ago.
On X, the reaction skewed toward relief. “Holy buckets this is the single greatest piece of WordPress related news I’ve seen in like a decade,” wrote developer James Welbes. “Finally, this is one of the best pieces of news the WordPress ecosystem has seen in years,” posted developer Enrique Chavez.
But others pushed back. WPManageNinja founder Md Shahjahan praised Mullenweg for keeping WordPress.org outside Automattic’s corporate structure. “Matt had 20+ years to make a lot more money from WordPress if that was what he wanted,” he wrote on X. “He could have put commercial gates everywhere.” Developer Fahim Reza wrote that he worried about “what happens without people like him protecting it. I don’t want to wake up one day and see Salesforce, or another huge company, controlling the future of WordPress.”
On Reddit’s r/Wordpress, where Mullenweg posts as photomatt, a commenter speculated about whether shareholders could call a meeting to replace the board. He replied: ‘I can fill seats on the board whenever I want, but that’s not the point.’
On Hacker News, in a thread speculating on his mental health, he responded: “A lot of stupid people are swayed by the bots paid by the dark PR firms that PE engages to astroturf things and two-brain-cell ‘technical’ YouTubers that have never optimized milliseconds off code that runs billions of times a day, never set up a rack that terabits flow through…”
An evolving story
It’s still not clear why Mullenweg was put on leave and whether it’s permanent or temporary. Automattic, Davies and board member Toni Schneider — who served as Automattic’s CEO from 2006 to 2014 before Mullenweg took over — didn’t respond to questions from The Repository on the reasoning behind the board’s decision.
What’s known is, at least, some of the backdrop that’s in the public domain: BlackRock’s latest SEC filing values its Automattic shares at $14.33, an 83% decline from the $85 it paid in 2021. The spoliation sanctions hearing is September 30. The company laid off 16% of its workforce in April 2025 and has been in federal litigation with WP Engine for nearly two years.
At TechCrunch Disrupt in October 2024, Mullenweg said he held 84% of Automattic’s voting power. He remains on the board. He personally owns WordPress.org. His leave from Automattic doesn’t change any of that.
Early Friday, local time, Mullenweg posted on X: “Boards are never boring 😂” According to sources, there’s talk he may be returning to Automattic, though in what capacity isn’t clear.
Disclosure: WP Engine and Automattic-owned Pressable are sponsors of The Repository.
Feature image: Atsushi Ando, WordCamp Europe 2025.