Comment by glenstein
1 day ago
Seems like nobody is actually reading the TFA which is a shame because what the article describes is truly mind boggling:
>However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic
What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.
It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him).
> It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him).
So what happens when the courts get involved?
Because "he won, because he was the only one with the passwords," seems like a software engineer fantasy.
It's a true power struggle. As a software engineer I have actually fallen into the trap of thinking that because of the law or a contract something would happen. It is a softer power than I expected.
The board wants to make money, that's why they hold shares and positions. If Mullenweg has the power to destroy value, that will be powerful leverage over them. If his employees side with him, if he holds the accounts, they'll have to negotiate carefully.
Of course, you would need a lawyer to determine when this crosses from a civil dispute to a criminal dispute because at some point him using the keys when he's not authorized could be a crime and if they can get the cops involved that certainly changes the dynamic.
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Reminds me of that story of the CEO of ARM China was fired but refused to return the chop which meant he was still in power.
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Eventually someone is 'root'
Up until recently (and my intervention) my work had multiple aws accounts tied to individual people, where they had inherited a personal account into the billing org.
There are also, in business use, some domains where an executive personally owns the registration but has delegated DNS into the company. There is no written agreement.
A former employer completely lost access to a couple of social media accounts (twitter/$company, etc) after laying off enough people.
Possession is 9/10ths of the law.
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That reminds me of the San Fco "network administrator" who would not provide the passwords to anyone in city gov't and brought things down to a standstill. Eventually he capitulated and provided the governor the passwords to their networks. Some people!
If he really did this, he's going to prison, but not for a few years. Defrauding shareholders is one of the worst things you can do, because it attacks the system directly.
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He also may simply be an outright majority shareholder himself (he said he owns 84% of the company in 2024) and able to easily and unilaterally replace the board.
Didn’t this happen at ARM China?
The board of the parent ARM company fired him. He just kept going like the China unit was his company.
I don’t know how that ended.
It took them two years to finally get him out with the help of the government in Shenzhen
https://www.nme.com/news/arm-china-finally-ousts-rogue-ceo-t...
And this is why building governance out of a pack of cards is a risky business...
If you cannot escalate a governance issue to a higher power, the controls are not worth the paper they are written on.
Wait China pulled off a coup inside ARM?
Agree… the article doesn’t make it clear that he’s really back, just that he has taken control of key company assets like the company Slack and is saying he’s back.
I don’t think this is over until the board releases a statement. CEOs can pontificate all they want but at the end of the day the board is legally in charge of and the final say at a company. 99.99% of the time it’s just the CEO saying everything and the board quietly giving their blessing out of view. This is the 0.01% where everyone actually wants the board to speak, loudly and clearly.
> he has taken control of key company assets like the company Slack and is saying he’s back
To be clear, Matt seems to have stolen Automattic's assets. That drops into several categories of shareholder lawsuit and potentially criminal behaviour.
It would help if the journalist/bloggers at Techcrunch published article headlines that accurately reflected the story they themselves wrote.
In many news organizations--certainly newspapers, potentially an outfit as big as TechCrunch--headlines are typically not written by the authors themselves but instead by an (copy)editor. Many times journalists are unhappy with the headline that an article ultimately runs with.
Control of the money, the software infrastructure, and social support is key to a coup. Legal correctness is very weak leverage.
Similar to a government coup where you need to control the money and the military.
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.
Right it's more like open defiance of a board decision that the board hasn't yet decided how to respond to. And in the meantime we don't know if the statements about him being back are official or just him going rogue.
But apparently he's booted out the admins who would be able to do anything (from the slack at least) while stating to the public everything has been resolved. This is astonishing and I would argue at least as unhinged as the activity for which the board was removing him.
This sounds like a mental breakdown.
He's been having this mental breakdown constantly for the last who knows how many years.
No, it just sounds like a troll.
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The whole fucking Valley has been out of their mind on prescription amphetamines for at least a decade. The most visible people like Matt and Elon and a few others have the most visible effects but breakdowns like this are happening hourly with less fanfare.
See if you can think of any other interesting historical events that happened when the whole leadership and rank and file were on prescription amphetamines.
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Very elaborate prank in preparation of the Talk-like-a-Pirate-Day on Sept 19th?
Yarrr me hearty's that gave me a good belly chuckle! Time to do some swash buckling on yee olde houseboat!
That company sounds like a clusterfuck. Good luck attracting good talent with such dysfunctional leadership.
A lot of WordPress enterprise users will be upset after finding out that after paying $20-100k a month, Wordpress actually poaches their employees. Just inspect a Wordpress enterprise site's response to certain endpoints using cURL or Postman, it will actually tell you to apply for Automattic. I have been meaning to write about this for a very long time.
People pay $100k/mo for fucking Wordpress in 2026?
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That doesn't sound like poaching to me? I mean, if it's a public endpoint, the person who finds it could be an independent contractor hired to work on the site, or a random person on the Internet probing the site for fun.
What you describe sounds more like a cleverly hidden ad. Google and others were famous for this during silicon valley's growth phase when you could get a job as a software engineer if you had heard of Java in passing and could fog a mirror.
Intent matters: a hiring campaign doesn't rise to the level of poaching unless there is some concerted effort to attract specific employees and/or talent from a specific company.
Finally, poaching is a perjorative term, but the practice of hiring another company's talent (even if they are a competitor) is not illegal or unethical. Companies SHOULD have to compete against each other for top talent.
Eh I mean this is common default no? If you inspect element on many sites it links to the career page. Reddit, discord, etc.
Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching
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It's not poaching to post an ad that someone who works elsewhere happens to see.
Its called "free movement of labor" and its a very good thing. Arguably the reason that Silicon Valley happened in the first place.
Humans are not cattle
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Might by time for another employee buyout? https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/17/24272867/automattic-empl...
Too bad because they have some incredible products
All I know is Wordpress and Beeper, are any of their other products good? Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
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Eh, it's not a seller's market anymore.
I cannot read the article, thanks for summarizing.
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