Comment by dofm
12 hours ago
He is surely very evidently mentally ill.
This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for decades, as well as writing a big chunk of what was "early modern" WP. Before he came unglued.
The fact that he looked, sounded, talked the way he did, was involved, put his own money where his mouth is, and was press-available to the extent he was is a lot of why WordPress was ever taken seriously. Given the level of control he has, it was used pretty judiciously for the longest time.
I am of the opinion that his broad charge against WP Engine was valid; I think he handled it insanely.
But as I say, he has come unglued. I'd be surprised if he returns to the job. I wish him well as I think anyone who has made money because of WP should. Things have gone wrong but there was a long run of things going remarkably well.
I do think this was overdue, for everyone including Matt, even though he evidently cannot see it. I hope, but am not hopeful as it were, that he sees that this is a message from the world to change track. I would instead expect to see a bit of revenge.
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.
> I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful.
There are, to me, abundant signs that he is severely burned out, dysregulated and irrational.
(In this statement, in other statements, in his actions that wilfully worsened his own case against WP Engine, in his blog posts etc.)
These are mental health issues. I have experienced many of them myself (I am indeed recovering from them now) and do not know what else you could possibly call them.
He is very evidently experiencing continuing poor mental health. I don't know why the board would say "leave of absence" if they were not themselves alluding to his health. He clearly needs a break from the thing he does for his own benefit.
I absolutely wish him well and hope he steps back and takes care of himself for a while; none of this is worth worse health.
I'm no expert, but I suspect that a pattern of lashing out against opponents during in a high stakes business dispute would not typically be considered clinically significant on its own. I don't know how you or others in this thread are intending to use terms like "mental illness" or "mental health issues," but generally I don't think they're appropriate unless you're talking about problems where there's evidence of an underlying dysfunction and no other obvious immediate cause (like exhaustion). Of course, some may argue it's not appropriate to diagnose public figures either way.
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You are forgetting that he is a rich and famous person. Those people can't be mentally ill, they can be eccentric, bizarre, funky or outlandish. But never actually mentally ill, that word is reserved for the plebeians like us.
It just sounds like the behaviours of an unprofessional douchebag to me, not mental illness
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That is mental illness. It doesn't imply that a virus took hold of your brain cells. It can be inability to cope with the real world. I suspect most of us will go through it at some point in our lives.
> 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.
> WP Engine happens to own Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is basically WordPress's answer to the Drupal Fields API.
The speed with which Matt hijacked that plugin was one of the funniest parts of this saga. All while complaining they don’t contribute!
Finally a sane comment. If you actually watched the interview with Theo, he openly admits to just randomly throwing in a demand of arbitrary percentage of their sales. The whole episode is actually insane.
> 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.
Many an old open-source project ran into this trap. Elasticsearch is one good example. Back when the old GPL era open-source projects were invented, the idea of third parties taking open-source software and just making a shitload of money with it was unthought of - and certainly not at the scale of Amazon AWS.
The only counterexample was Wikipedia's MediaWiki, it similarly is GPL but from the start it was clear that there would be at least one commercial side actor - Wikia, nowadays called Fandom.
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.