Automattic Board Ousts Mullenweg, Puts Him on Leave

Automattic's board of directors voted late on September 9, 2026 to put Matt Mullenweg, the company's co-founder and CEO, on paid leave. Mullenweg says he cast the only vote against his own removal, and that the board gave him barely enough warning to find a lawyer, let alone fight it.

He broke the news himself, in the company's internal Slack, before any formal statement went out. In his account, three non-executive directors, Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider and Sue Decker, worked with chief financial officer Mark Davies to draft a resolution and bring it to a vote with almost no notice. "I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start," he wrote, adding that he asked repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent counsel and was refused each time. Davies, the same executive Mullenweg accuses of conspiring against him, is now running day-to-day operations in his place.

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• Automattic's board voted on September 9, 2026 to place CEO Matt Mullenweg on paid leave of absence.
• Mullenweg says he got 50 minutes' notice of the vote and was denied time to consult outside legal counsel.
• CFO Mark Davies, whom Mullenweg accuses of helping orchestrate the vote, has taken over his operational duties.
• The move caps two years of fallout from Automattic's legal war with hosting rival WP Engine, including a recent motion accusing Mullenweg of destroying evidence.

What exactly happened on September 9?

Automattic's board called a meeting and, within an hour of handing Mullenweg the written resolution, voted to place him on paid leave of absence. He remains a shareholder and, by his own account, still a board member, but he no longer runs the company he started in 2005. Davies has stepped into his responsibilities, though Automattic has not named a permanent successor. Neither Automattic's board nor Davies has issued a public statement laying out their side; everything public so far traces back to Mullenweg's own Slack post and the reporting that followed it.

Why would a board move against its own founder?

This didn't come out of nowhere. Mullenweg has spent the better part of two years fighting WP Engine, a large managed-WordPress host, after he decided in September 2024 that WP Engine was profiting off the WordPress trademark without giving enough back to the project. He publicly called the company "a cancer to WordPress" and demanded it pay roughly 8% of its revenue as a trademark licensing fee, or commit an equivalent amount of engineering time to WordPress core. WP Engine refused and sued. Automattic then offered its own staff a buyout: nine months of severance for anyone who didn't want to stay through the fight. About 159 employees, roughly one-twelfth of the company, took the deal in October 2024, and more left in later rounds.

The legal fight never really cooled off. Court filings this year include a motion for sanctions accusing Mullenweg of failing to preserve evidence during discovery, with his laptop and phone reportedly unaccounted for. A board that has watched its founder pick a public fight with a major customer, bleed staff, and now face sanctions allegations in active litigation has a straightforward motive to act, even if the way it acted, blindsiding him with under an hour's notice, is what's drawing the most attention today.

Who does this actually affect?

WordPress still powers a huge share of the web's content management, and Automattic's other properties, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Pocket Casts, Day One and Jetpack among them, all report up through the same leadership Mullenweg just lost control of. None of that infrastructure changes hands or stops working today; this is a leadership fight, not an outage. But agencies, hosts, and plugin developers who build businesses on WordPress now have a genuine open question about who sets policy on the trademark, the plugin directory, and the boundary between the open-source project and the for-profit company that has effectively controlled it. That boundary was already contested; it's the same one WP Engine sued over.

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What does it mean for Automattic's backers?

Automattic is privately held, last valued near $7.5 billion after a 2021 round, with investors including Tiger Global, Salesforce Ventures, Insight Partners and BlackRock on its cap table. There's no ticker to move, but the signal for anyone with money in the company is the same kind private-market investors watch anywhere: a founder-CEO getting removed by his own board, under contested circumstances, in the middle of active litigation, is exactly the governance risk that shows up in a markdown at the next round or a harder push toward an eventual sale or IPO. Automattic has occasionally been floated as an IPO candidate over the years; a messy leadership transition, on top of two years of an ugly lawsuit, doesn't make that path easier.

1. Sep 2024Mullenweg publicly demands WP Engine pay roughly 8% of revenue for use of the WordPress trademark calls WP Engine "a cancer to WordPress"
2. Oct 2024WP Engine sues Automattic and Mullenweg; roughly 159 Automattic employees take a severance buyout rather than stay about one-twelfth of staff
3. 2025Litigation continues; WP Engine later files a motion for sanctions over Mullenweg's alleged failure to preserve evidence laptop and phone reportedly unaccounted for
4. Sep 9, 2026Automattic's board votes to place Mullenweg on paid leave; he casts the only vote against resolution delivered 50 minutes before the vote
5. Sep 9, 2026CFO Mark Davies takes over Mullenweg's operational responsibilities no permanent CEO named

Our take

Mullenweg built WordPress into the backbone of a huge chunk of the web, and he also spent the last two years turning a trademark dispute into a public brawl that cost Automattic staff, goodwill, and now, apparently, his own job. Boards don't usually move this fast or this bluntly against a founder unless they think the alternative, letting him keep steering through active litigation, is the bigger risk. Whether he's back in six months or never again, this is the clearest sign yet that Automattic's board decided the WP Engine fight had gotten more expensive to keep him in charge of than to take him out of the chair.

Original analysis by GenZTech, based on reporting from 404 Media, Hacker News and CIO. Read the original report.