
CEOs often make bad mistakes, but it’s hard to fathom exactly what Automattic CEO and co-founder Matt Mullenweg thinks he’s doing to his company and WordPress.
For decades, one of the easiest decisions a company could make was to answer the question: “What content management system (CMS) should we use for our website?” The answer was, for 472 million sites, WordPress. That’s about 43.6% of all websites for you counting at home. That was then. This is now.
In recent months, Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress and the popular CMS, has been at the center of a contentious dispute that has sent shockwaves through the WordPress community. This conflict, primarily between Automattic and WP Engine, a prominent managed WordPress hosting company, has changed how WordPress operates, works with its partners, and how its once loyal customers see it.
It all started in September 2024 when Mullenweg published a scathing blog post calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.” Shades of Steve Ballmer calling Linux a cancer. We all know how well that worked. Mullenweg accused the hosting company of profiting from WordPress branding without proper licensing. He criticized its majority investor, Silver Lake, for not contributing enough to the WordPress open-source project.
Pardon?
Lots of companies make money from WordPress by offering services and add-ons. It’s an open-source project. That’s how companies profit from them. True, WP Engine is probably the most successful third-party WordPress company, with an estimated value of somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. Automattic, however, is worth more than $7.5 billion. What’s the problem?
Mullenweg continued to rant about the evils of WP Engine. Specifically, he hates that WP Engine disables the WordPress revisions utility by default on its hosting platform. To Mullenweg, this is WP Engine, “strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our users a crappier experience so they can make more money.”
Delivering a crappier experience to their customers is a way to make money? Interesting business strategy, don’t you think?
On September 25, Mullenweg banned WP Engine, and therefore their customers, from accessing WordPress.org resources. This cut them off from being able to update plugins and themes. WP Engine and its customers were not amused. This move left their websites vulnerable and unable to apply critical security updates. Since then, WP Express has built its own update mechanism so its users can be safe from future Automattic actions seeking to block them from patches.
You can guess what happened next: The situation quickly escalated into a legal battle. WP Engine sued Automattic and Mullenweg on October 3, accusing them of extortion, interference with operations, abuse of power and harm to business. The lawsuit revealed text messages allegedly showing Mullenweg offering to alter his WordCamp speech, where he’d told the WordPress community of WP Engine’s “betrayal” if WP Engine agreed to pay Automattic 8% of its annual revenues, amounting to about $32 million.
How would you react if someone demanded you pay them 8% of your annual revenue? Yeah. Like that.
In the meantime, Mullenweg and Automattic have vehemently denied WP Engine’s accusations, calling the lawsuit meritless. Be that as it may, the legal battle has spilled out over the WordPress community.
For starters, Mullenweg added a checkbox to the WordPress.org contributor login, demanding developers verify they are not associated with WP Engine. The contributor community widely criticized this action, with some reporting being banned from the community Slack for opposing the move.
This conflict has also caused internal strife at Automattic. In October, Mullenweg offered buyout packages to employees who disagreed with his actions, resulting in 177 employees, about 10% of the headcount, leaving the company. Despite this exodus, Mullenweg claimed to feel “more energized and excited” about working with the remaining team.
However, that didn’t stop him from shutting down the WordPress Sustainability Team. In a rather astonishing display of pettiness, after the Team rep Thijs Buijs announced in Making WordPress Slack that he was stepping down from his role, citing a Reddit thread Mullenweg created asking for suggestions on how to create more WordPress drama in 2025, Mullenweg replied, “Today I learned that we have a sustainability team. … looking at [the] results of the team so far and the ROI of time invested, it’s probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely.”
Top technology journalist Kara Swisher was appalled. On Threads, she wrote, “The @wordpress platform was where @mossbergwalt and I started All Things D and later Recode, because it was so good and @photomatt was always very helpful. But what a pathetic turn for him into a stone-cold asshole.”
She’s far from the only person who sees him that way. Joost de Valk, an Internet entrepreneur who’s been involved with WordPress, spoke for many when he wrote, “We, the WordPress community, need to decide if we’re ok being led by a single person who controls everything, and might do things we disagree with, or if we want something else.” Many businesses are now wondering if they should continue to rely on WordPress, thanks to Mullenweg’s erratic behavior.
Their fears were aggravated when Automattic announced on January 15, 2025, that it would drastically reduce its contributions to the WordPress open-source project. Specifically, Automattic scaled back its weekly contribution from approximately 3,988 hours to just 45 hours. The company’s programmers will, instead, “focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce.”
It’s worth noting that WordPress.org, which hosts the open-source version of WordPress, relies on the sites and services Mullenweg controls.
Why? Automattic blames the WP Engine lawsuits. “This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health. We remain hopeful that WP Engine will reconsider this legal attack, allowing us to refocus our efforts on contributions that benefit the broader WordPress ecosystem.”
What the developers, who will now work on for-profit programs, have to do with the lawsuit remains an open question.
In the meantime, more and more developers and users are looking for a WordPress fork as a possible answer. WordPress is licensed under the GPLv2, so forking it is simple legally.
Indeed, there are already WordPress forks. The most important of these is ClassicPress, an existing fork of WordPress that has gained attention as a potential alternative.
Mullenweg’s response to the suggestion of a new fork has been… interesting. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, he said, “I think that’d be fantastic, actually. So people can have alternative governance or an alternative approach.”
But, when push came to shove, and several WordPress community members, including de Valk, started to talk about a fork, Mullenweg responded by deactivating their WordPress.org accounts. This would, he said, “make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground.”
That’s gone over well in the community. As programmer Gavin Anderegg wrote, “It’s hard to see how to move forward from here.” He continued, “These recent events really make it seem like you’re no longer welcome to contribute to WordPress if you question Matt Mullenweg.”
That’s pretty much it.
In response, Mullenweg’s support within the WordPress community has been declining. At the same time, though, while it may be easy to fork the code, building a community and a software ecosystem to replace WordPress is a much bigger job, which no one yet seems to be willing to turn their hands to.
Still, as the legal battle continues and Automattic reduces its contributions, the future of WordPress development remains uncertain. The community is grappling with questions about how these changes will affect the platform’s innovation, security, and overall direction. This, in turn, also means that CxOs need to start seriously thinking about what alternatives they might turn to if WordPress falters.