Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic, best known as the parent company of WordPress.com, has been put on a leave of absence by his board against his will, according to a Slack message seen by TechCrunch.

Earlier Wednesday, Mullenweg posted in a Slack channel visible to all employees that the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Davies, had “conspired” with other board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker to vote to put Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence.

The message read:

And the biggest news: I won’t be able to make the [meeting] tomorrow. @Mark Davies has conspired with @Ann Dunwoody, @Toni, and @Sue Decker behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that. Wishing Mark and all of you the very best.

To clarify @Mark Davies was voted as interim CEO. I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied.

A Slack message to the open source WordPress.org community from the project’s executive director, Mary Hubbard, also confirmed Mullenweg’s change of status at the commercial company. However, Hubbard said that WordPress.org was not impacted. “Matt remains the leader of the WordPress project and I remain Executive Director of WordPress. Our teams, priorities, and work continue as planned,” she wrote.

Mullenweg’s Slack message did not make clear why Automattic’s board took this action. Sources told 404 Media, which was the first to report the news, that Schneider — the former CEO of Automattic from 2006 to 2014 — confirmed that the action was initiated by the board. Davies also told employees in the Slack channel that Mullenweg remained on the board of directors.

In an emailed statement to TechCrunch, Automattic confirmed Mullenweg was on leave.

“Matt Mullenweg is currently on leave from Automattic,” the email read. “Mark Davies, Automattic’s CFO, will lead the company as interim CEO. The Board has full confidence in Mark’s leadership and in the team’s ability to execute against the company’s priorities.”

Automattic, which owns other brands including Tumblr, WooCommerce, and Pocket Casts, was founded by Mullenweg in 2003 after he co-created the popular open source content management system WordPress.

Over the past few years, Mullenweg and the company have been mired in lawsuits and controversy. The company is in a protracted legal battle with WP Engine, a WordPress web hosting competitor. The lawsuit followed allegations from Mullenweg that WP Engine was profiting from the open source WordPress project without contributing back to the community, and he demanded that it pay 8% of its monthly gross revenue as a royalty fee for using the WordPress brand.

WP Engine sued in October 2024 and accused Automattic and Mullenweg of defamation and abuse of power. Automattic filed counterclaims last year. In February, WP Engine claimed that Automattic intended to target 10 more competitors with royalty claims.

Tensions became so high under Mullenweg’s leadership that he told employees in 2024 to quit, with severance, if they disagreed with him, and 159 did so.

Last year, Mullenweg also threatened to deactivate the accounts of several members of the open source WordPress.org community, after two of them allegedly said they planned to spearhead a new forked version of the open source WordPress project. (Those involved denied their plans, but said Mullenweg went through with their account deactivations anyway, and also deactivated accounts belonging to other contributors, sources told TechCrunch.)

In April 2025, the company laid off 16% of its staff. The cuts included some longtime employees who had been with the company for more than a decade, sources told TechCrunch.

Some alumni have been asking current employees how they feel about the news, a source told TechCrunch. Some employees said they were “ecstatic” or “relieved,” but others had mixed emotions because the move creates more instability.

It isn’t clear why the company’s board made this decision now. One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.” This year’s festival ended on September 7.

Mullenweg may have dropped some hints about the cause of the board’s action when he made a series of posts on X on Wednesday evening. In one post, for instance, he wrote: “That they have a pretty good chance of getting a judge to say I spoiled evidence in a malicious way trying to hide something.” That’s in reference to the ongoing legal dispute between Mulleweng and Automattic with hosting company and WordPress contributor WP Engine. In his X posts, Mulleweng vehemently denied the allegation.

In another post, he said he now expects “smear attacks, so get ready for some National Enquirer rumors or hit pieces.” He added that he believed there was one attempt at this when his “Nikon D6 camera was stolen at Burning Man (recovered a day later), but luckily of the 2000+ photos on the memory card there was nothing they can use against me.”

He then shared a few of the pictures of art pieces he took at the famed festival.

Mullenweg did not respond to our emailed request for comment.

Note: This story has been updated to include mention of Mullenweg’s posts on X.

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