Top
Best
New

Posted by ilamont 7 hours ago

Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster(techcrunch.com)
70 points | 123 comments
glenstein 2 hours 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.

x0x0 6 minutes ago||
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.

stackghost 2 hours ago||
That company sounds like a clusterfuck. Good luck attracting good talent with such dysfunctional leadership.
neya 1 hour ago|||
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.
meric_ 1 hour ago||
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

saghm 2 hours ago||||
Might by time for another employee buyout? https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/17/24272867/automattic-empl...
subarctic 1 hour ago|||
Too bad because they have some incredible products
stackghost 1 hour ago||
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?
jimmydddd 26 minutes ago|||
Not an enterprise product, but SimpleNote is great. I was happy that they bought it.
sphars 29 minutes ago|||
I'm a fan of PocketCasts as my podcast app on Android. It was bought by Automattic in 2021.
BLKNSLVR 2 hours ago||
It does sound as if he has lost his grip on reality.

> 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.”

And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.

TJSomething 1 hour ago||
I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.
MBCook 1 hour ago||
The rumor I saw when all this started implied it was.

I think it said that Mullenweg always came back from burning man with lots of ideas.

The implication to me was the ideas were terrible and the board was afraid of having to deal with it yet again. But that’s a total guess.

csnover 1 hour ago|||
The additional reporting at [0] about his alleged behaviour in internal channels along with his public posts on social media really reinforces this same feeling for me:

> “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 also posted that the Automattic Slack “smells funny, like turncoats” and said he was going to hang out in the WordPress.org Slack instead.

Good luck to everyone in the blast radius.

[0] https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-swears-for-th...

nosioptar 2 hours ago|||
There's an episode of Archer where Archer and another dude have to battle to the death to determine who the new pirate king is.

Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat?

throwup238 13 minutes ago|||
> Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat?

There is a Thunderdome at Burning Man.

https://journal.burningman.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Th...

BLKNSLVR 1 hour ago|||
> Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man

Not beyond the realms of possibility then

moomoo11 1 hour ago||
you don’t get it he is quirky
dang 3 hours ago||
Recent and related:

Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 - Sept 2026 (144 comments)

Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283 - Sept 2026 (372 comments)

(I know there have been many other threads in this long saga but I don't have the time (or the stomach) to try to list them)

p.s. We merged an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683265) into this one, which is why the timestamps of some of the comments are older.

f33d5173 3 hours ago||
So he was on a leave of absense, and now is no longer on such a leave? This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense, but they give no evidence of that in the article. I saw it suggested that he usually has wild ideas after returning from burning man, and the board wanted to insulate the company from the effects of that. That he's now back is evidence for a theory along those lines, and contradicts a theory that the board was trying to get rid of him. But I have no insight beyond that.
wmf 39 minutes ago|
Do you think his leave of absence was for one day?
dcmatt 26 minutes ago||
Looks like he was just at Burning Man so this behavior tracks. https://ma.tt/2026/09/bm-snaps/
fn-mote 2 hours ago||
This title would benefit from editorializing “of Automattic” for those who do not follow the daily drama this individual has created.

ETA: Or better yet a clearer statement that nothing about this is clear.

NSUserDefaults 14 hours ago||
So glad I just converted my site to Hugo.. happy to get away from this whole bunch of people.
largbae 13 hours ago||
I only see the headlines of this drama. All it tells me is to stay far away from any dependency on this company.
xp84 2 hours ago||
In 2010 WordPress seemed like important technology. It wasn’t perfect, was a big and fruitful hacking target, but it had been built and refined and had a big ecosystem.

I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP.

Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?

t2r3121 1 hour ago|||
I used to ask this question back ~2015 - I was seeing companies with massive, clunky CMS installs just so their non-technical/less-technical staff could update their websites without filing tickets to IT/dev. It seemed to be more about those departments wanting autonomy and not having to wait weeks or months for internal IT/dev to make site updates. The consensus within one dev group was that the company would have been better served by hiring someone who knew HTML/CSS/Javascript to embed with the non-technical people and edit a straightforward frontend site for them.
ecshafer 30 minutes ago||
In most web frameworks its not terribly hard to extern content (you probably do this already for translations) and just have a nice little yaml or json thats easily edited.
dylan604 1 hour ago||||
Why would you have vulns if you vibe coded it in a weekend? Just tell it to not have any security vulnerabilities. Boom!
8note 42 minutes ago|||
you are less likely to have the same vulnerabilities as everyone else though, so unless somebody is targeting you, those vulnerabilities might not matter all that much
tjpnz 5 minutes ago|||
So security through obscurity.
archagon 22 minutes ago|||
Wot? You are incredibly likely to have the same vulnerabilities as everyone else (as they exist in your LLM’s training corpus).
t2r3121 1 hour ago|||
I mean... you can literally do that now. You can set up a loop to iteratively pentest, review and patch a codebase (with human supervision as you prefer) and it'll find and fix more vulnerabilities in a day than a pentest team used to find in a quarter, for a tiny fraction of the price.

This isn't a joke, this is now part of my pre-launch SOP. I even have it tracking everything so I can log stuff to fix vs. known shippables vs intentional design/false positives vs. upstream stuff which doesn't have a fix available yet, and keep track of which builds have the fixes. Almost entirely automated, I mostly review the findings and do some categorization/enrichment during the pentest review stage, and do a human code review pass as patches are submitted.

Stuff that used to take me multiple hours to write a fix for and then weeks to get code reviewed and deployed now get done in minutes.

lukevp 1 hour ago||
How do you actually do that? Is it all running locally? Cloud agents? Would love to hear about this. I see these deep agent loops mostly just burning tokens, but when I guide the AI I get very good results, so I’m not sure where the disconnect lies.
t2r3121 53 minutes ago||
I use Zed (https://zed.dev) as my agent harness and either the $20 ChatGPT sub + Sol for personal/independent projects or an enterprise Claude account for sponsored/paid work. From the stats for my current work I use about $400/mo in tokens and a lot of that is non-coding work like pruning JIRA, managing business documentation, making dashboards - so my true coding agent cost is significantly less.

It's pretty simple, you could probably set up something like that by:

Configure some kind of CLI tool to talk to your ticketing system and git repo so you can programmatically interact with them. If you don't have a ticketing system, instruct the agent to use local text or markdown files to track issues and progress.

Ideally, make your code runnable in a way the agent can use. For my webapps I build a test harness so that I can run all the endpoints and workflows via reproducible tests against an embedded database. This is easier than it sounds, e.g. there are libraries out there to embed PostgreSQL or SQLite into source code, you can set up a test harness so you can run unit tests, integration tests and workflow tests that use your real frontend, server and database.

Paste this comment thread into the agent prompt and tell it to run a similar loop on your code base: a session that searches for vulns and writes up a report, some way for a human to do a review pass on the report, a session that indexes the reviewed findings into tickets, and sessions that fix the fixable issues and submit patches to your repo. The next search session should first read all the open issues so it doesn't duplicate work of earlier sessions.

LESS IS MORE - avoid fancy agent tooling and skills, don't cargo cult from others, build your own tools as you find your own needs. If something can be automated, use the agent to write tools and tests for it, don't just keep prodding the agent to do it.

graemep 1 hour ago|||
A lot of people know it, there are a huge number of existing installs that work well, the ecosystem is huge and not everyone wants to vibe code replacements.

It is very empowering for people with limited skills.

dlcarrier 5 hours ago||
Definitely stay away from anything Matt Mullenweg is involved in. Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.
cebert 14 hours ago||
This sounds like a mistake and a part of Automatic. This is not a good look for the brand.
zero_shift 14 hours ago|
I only recently realised why the org is called AutoMATTic
vulcan01 2 hours ago||
Kumail Nanjiani learning what Automattic is: https://youtu.be/5Y64UeNeiOM?t=74
scarecrowbob 12 hours ago|||
It took me quite a while to "get" the "Arby's" restaurant name.
Sniffnoy 2 hours ago||
So on reading this comment I was like, "oh, I see, Arby's, like RB, roast beef?" Except on looking it up, that's not the explanation! "Arby's" does come from the initials "RB"... but it doesn't stand for "roast beef", it stands for "Raffel brothers"! Rather less obvious.
stackghost 2 hours ago||
Tangential, but I have no idea who is eating at Arby’s. The food looks positively vile from the advertisements.
xp84 2 hours ago|||
It used to be pretty good. Same as most fast food.
anymouse123456 1 hour ago||
No. It wasn’t ever good. Tried it in the early eighties. It was barely dog food back then too.
giantrobot 21 minutes ago||
Do you not like your dogs or something? I wouldn't give Arby's to someone I hated.
nosioptar 1 hour ago|||
The food is pretty vile. Friends that worked their described the "beef" as being a weird loaf of pressurized mewt-like protein before its sliced.

I used to eat there occasionally because it was cheapish many, many years ago.

Hamuko 13 hours ago|||
Did you know that Adidas was founded by Adolf "Adi" Dassler?
robshep 13 hours ago|||
And Puma by his brother Rudi, in the same town. Great Feud story.
tzs 2 hours ago|||
Another brother/brother business rivalry, although not involving founders, was Sears and Montgomery Ward from 1985-1990. In 1985 Bernard Brennan become CEO of Montgomery Ward and in that same year his older brother Edward Brennan become CEO of Sears.

Chicago-based Sears was the largest US retailer at the time, and Chicago-based Montgomery Ward was the 5th largest.

pan69 7 hours ago||||
Similar thing with Aldi. Both brothers kept the name, sort of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi#Split

dofm 11 hours ago||||
Rudidas would definitely be a worse name. Though I'd be surprised if an Amazon Marketplace knockoff brand is not already using it.
mercer 9 hours ago|||
Adolfler would've been even worse.
dylan604 1 hour ago||
Not in today's climate.
Hamuko 10 hours ago|||
It was briefly "Ruda" before it morphed into "Puma".
dofm 10 hours ago||
I did not know that. Very good decision!
pluc 11 hours ago|||
all day i diss another sibling
xp84 1 hour ago|||
Imagine how glad they were at some point that they didn’t go with “Adolf’s Sneakers”!
rpozarickij 14 hours ago||
A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).
Haven880 2 hours ago|||
Not really explaining autoMATTic. Amazon, "A" is because Jeff wanted it at the top of search. Fox, Dell, Walmart, Disney, all is closer to the example.
MBCook 54 minutes ago|||
I was just thinking about the A thing the other day.

A1 Plumbing, Acme Brick, AAA Home Servicing all the companies named over the years to try and be the first in the phone book.

But phone books have been dead for a long time. And search results aren’t alphabetical. It would be interesting for someone to graph or somehow otherwise show how names have changed in response.

I have seen those occasional pictures of businesses named “(thing) near me” in an attempt to win at Google searches.

jrflowers 1 hour ago|||
Same with Taco Bell
dylan604 1 hour ago||
If only Alexander hadn't wasted time on the phone!
More comments...