Automattic's Board Tried to Oust Matt Mullenweg. The Coup Collapsed in 33 Hours Because He Owns 84 Percent of the Votes

Automattic's board tried to remove its own founder and chief executive, Matt Mullenweg, earlier this year, and the attempt collapsed within 33 hours once it ran into a simple math problem: Mullenweg controls roughly 84% of the company's voting stock. On September 9, 2026, a special committee of three directors, former Automattic chief executive Toni Schneider, former Yahoo president Sue Decker, and retired four-star Army general Ann Dunwoody, voted to place Mullenweg on paid leave while he was traveling back from Burning Man. Chief financial officer Mark Davies was named interim chief executive as part of the move.

The coup never had a realistic path to actually sticking. By September 12, Mullenweg had regained control of the company and announced his return internally over Slack. Schneider and Decker resigned from the board, Dunwoody was removed, and both Davies and chief legal officer Andy Missan were fired after roughly 33 hours in their new roles, departing with severance agreements that together totaled around $8.15 million. Mullenweg has since appointed a new board that includes science fiction author Hugh Howey, author Andy Chan, and IRL co-founders Krutal Desai and Henry Khachatryan.

Court filings reviewed around the episode point to what may have actually triggered the move: mounting concern over how Automattic has handled evidence preservation in its ongoing legal fight with WP Engine. The company reportedly turned over only 16 Telegram messages from Mullenweg despite a legal obligation to preserve relevant communications, and WhatsApp and Signal messages that should have existed were reportedly missing. Mullenweg has said he lost a phone while traveling and that the location of a laptop was unknown, and the phone in question was not fully copied by forensic examiners until March 2026. A federal court held a hearing on the evidence issues on October 7, 2026.

The underlying dispute with WP Engine, a WordPress hosting company owned by private equity firm Silver Lake, has been building for roughly two years. Mullenweg has argued that WP Engine contributes only a fraction of what Automattic puts into maintaining WordPress, citing a gap of around 40 hours a week from WP Engine against roughly 3,900 hours a week from Automattic, and has pushed for a revenue-sharing arrangement that started with a request for $5 million a year. He took the fight public rather than negotiating privately, at one point describing WP Engine as a cancer on WordPress, and in October 2024 offered employees who disagreed with his approach $30,000 or six months of salary to leave the company; 159 employees, about 8.4% of the workforce, took the offer. WP Engine sued Automattic that same month, alleging attempted extortion, libel, and business interference, and later added antitrust claims that a federal judge has allowed to move forward.

WordPress itself remains the software running more than 40% of the web, built out of a project Mullenweg and Mike Little started in 2003. Automattic, the company Mullenweg founded in 2005 around it, also owns WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Tumblr, which it bought in 2019 for $3 million, and was last valued at $7.5 billion in a 2021 funding round after raising roughly $1 billion in total. The failed coup leaves Mullenweg firmly back in charge of that company, with the WP Engine litigation, and the questions about how his own communications were handled during it, still unresolved.