Inside the 33-hour failed boardroom coup to overthrow WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg

On Sept. 9, the six-member board of Automattic—the company that owns WordPress, Tumblr, and other web-based apps—voted to put its CEO, Matt Mullenweg, on leave. The move seemingly came out of the blue: Mullenweg had just returned from his annual trip to Burning Man, and the board was made up largely of directors who had mentored Mullenweg for years.  
 
Mullenweg broke the news himself, in a Slack message to employees: “And the biggest news: I won’t be able to make the [meeting] tomorrow,” he wrote. “@Mark Davies has conspired with @Ann Dunwoody, @Toni, and @Sue Decker behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.” 

And then, 33 hours later, Mullenweg was back in control, and the three directors who tried to sideline him were gone, along with the company’s CFO and its chief legal officer. “(Don’t call it a comeback…) Howdy everybody!” he wrote to staff upon his arrival, alongside a link to LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out.” 

A remarkable level of secrecy surrounded the drama. None of the board members have publicly explained why they suddenly wanted him out of the company. Mullenweg has declined to describe why he was all but fired, or how he quickly got back control of the company. 

Even some of Automattic’s investors were left guessing; a person familiar with BlackRock’s investment in the company said they learned of the board’s move from news reports and still don’t understand how Mullenweg was able to undo it. “I don’t understand how he basically reinstated himself and reversed the decision of the vote,” the person said. “That makes no sense to us.” 

But interviews by Fortune with former Automattic employees, along with court filings, show a company long-divided against itself in an as-yet unresolved civil war over Mullenweg’s fight with WP Engine, a company that sells WordPress hosting. At most companies, such a piece of litigation would be an issue best left to the general counsel’s office. But at Automattic, Mullenweg’s pursuit of WP Engine—and his colleagues’ disagreement with that strategy—has led to the departure of 159 staffers, so far. 

The legal battle has become a liability for the company. WP Engine sued both Automattic and Mullenweg in October 2024, accusing them of attempted extortion, and later added antitrust claims that a federal judge revived on Sept. 24 of this year. If WP Engine wins those claims, federal antitrust law could let it collect three times its damages. Automattic countersued a year after the original suit, accusing WP Engine of trademark infringement. WP Engine has now asked the judge to throw out those claims as punishment for Mullenweg’s alleged bad-faith conduct during the suit, which included what WP Engine called the implausible loss of electronic devices containing messages it was seeking in discovery. 

At a hearing on Oct. 7, four weeks after the board’s vote, the judge overseeing the dispute said he was leaning toward denying that request, according to The Repository, a WordPress industry publication. However, he also said that Automattic’s former lawyers had exaggerated what they had done to preserve Mullenweg’s messages. 

“Destruction of evidence, withholding of evidence in the course of civil litigation is very serious,” Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor and former chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, told Fortune. “Companies get in big trouble for that.” If a judge finds a company failed to preserve evidence, he said, “the judge can assume the worst.” 

Neither Mullenweg nor his board responded to multiple requests for comment. 

If you’ve read a website—any website, ever—there’s a good chance its headlines, photos, and articles were created on WordPress. WordPress is the free publishing software that powers more than 40% of the web. (Fortune uses WordPress.) Mullenweg created it with Mike Little in 2003 as a free, open-source project anyone can use and adjust. Two years later, he founded Automattic—deliberately misspelling the brand name so that it included his own first name. The purpose of the new venture was to allow other businesses to be built on top of WordPress, including WordPress.com and WooCommerce, a software tool that turns a WordPress site into an online store. 

He later also acquired the once-trendy social network Tumblr in 2019, for just $3 million—a fraction of its peak valuation at $1.1 billion (when it was acquired by Yahoo!). In 2021, Automattic raised $288 million in its fifth funding round, valuing the company at about $7.5 billion. All told, it has raised close to $1 billion from investors. 

Hitting them where it hurts 

Open source depends on a delicate balance. Automattic gives its software away, competes with companies that sell services built on it, and counts on those same companies to help maintain it. The WordPress world is vast. It has its own news site, WP Tavern, which Mullenweg personally owns, a buzzing subreddit, and an ecosystem of businesses that exist only because the software is free.  

In 2024, Mullenweg decided one of those companies, WP Engine, wasn’t holding up its end of the deal. WP Engine, majority-owned by private equity firm Silver Lake, sells hosting for WordPress websites, the servers and support that keep a site running. Mullenweg said the two companies were roughly the same size, yet while Automattic donated about 3,900 hours a week to improving WordPress, WP Engine gave roughly 40 back. He accused WP Engine of switching off a WordPress feature that saves past versions of posts as a cost-cutting measure and said Silver Lake “doesn’t give a dang about your open source ideals.” He called WP Engine a “cancer” on WordPress, demanded a cut of its revenue for using the WordPress trademark (Automattic’s first offer, according to its court filings, was $5 million a year), and cut it off from key resources. Silver Lake did not respond to a message requesting comment. 

So, WP Engine sued Automattic and Mullenweg in federal court in Northern California, accusing them of attempted extortion, libel, and interfering with the business, later adding antitrust claims. 

Both sides deny the other’s claims. Automattic and Mullenweg deny wrongdoing and argue that WP Engine’s suit is “baseless” retaliation and that Mullenweg’s public statements about the company were true or were opinion “protected” by the courts. They have also denied the antitrust claims, which the judge initially dismissed before reviving them. WP Engine denies infringing any trademark, arguing that it used “WordPress” only to describe the software its customers use, which it says is legal and even explicitly permitted. 

Inside Automattic, Mullenweg’s demands for a slice of WP Engine’s revenue didn’t make sense, sources told Fortune. His plan amounted to little more than hitting WP Engine until it hurt, according to a former employee who worked closely with Mullenweg. Mullenweg wouldn’t explain his strategy even to the senior leaders asked to defend it publicly, said the person, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. It didn’t seem like there was a clear endgame, the person said.  

That fight played out beyond the legal department. Mullenweg waged it on his blog, on X, on stage at WordPress conferences, and employees were expected to get behind it. In October 2024, Mullenweg offered staff who disagreed with his approach $30,000 or six months’ salary, whichever was higher, to leave, calling it an “alignment offer.” 159 people took it, about 8.4% of the company, according to Mullenweg’s blog.   

A former Automattic team lead said he was one of them, in part because he thought Mullenweg’s decision to fight WP Engine so publicly, rather than negotiate privately, would hurt the company. “I felt it’s not going to develop well for the company in the future,” he said, “and it happened to be so.” 

Not everyone saw it that way. Naman Malhotra, a former WooCommerce engineering lead who spent nearly five years at Automattic before leaving in 2025 to start his own company, said he thought Mullenweg “did the right thing” by confronting WP Engine. “If you’re using open source, you need to contribute back,” he said. Some colleagues were anxious about the lawsuit, Malhotra said, but most remained believers in what Mullenweg was trying to do. He called the buyout offer unusually generous. “I’ve never seen any company do that,” he said. 

Another former senior employee who took the buyout said that, to Mullenweg’s credit, he welcomed pushback. “He never made me feel like my job was at risk for disagreeing with him,” he said. “Not once.” He said he was sympathetic to Mullenweg’s frustration with companies that profit from WordPress without giving much back. “There has to be a quid pro quo,” he said. “I have never met anyone who works harder for an important idea.” 

As dissenting employees left, the one group left to check Mullenweg was his board. Mullenweg’s relationship with his directors was so close, the employee said, that it felt familial. Toni Schneider quit his job as a Yahoo vice president in 2006 to run Automattic alongside Mullenweg back when he was only 22, served as CEO for eight years, and stayed on the board afterwards. For its first 13 years, the board added no new members. The first, in 2018, was Ann Dunwoody, a retired four-star Army general whom Mullenweg tracked down after reading her book while researching how to run a company with no central office. He flew to Florida to meet her. 

But their literal power was limited. Mullenweg has said he owns about 84% of the voting power of Automattic’s stock. Exactly how is unclear, even to some shareholders. The person familiar with BlackRock’s investment said they didn’t know how Mullenweg had amassed that much control, and doubted investors had simply handed him their votes. 

That makes the board’s decision to act against Mullenweg all the more striking. This was a suicide mission. There was no mathematical way for them to overcome Mullenweg’s votes. Thus, a move like that could not have been made lightly, the former employee said; perhaps, it was more of a message.  

Legal exposure  

Court filings suggest what may have triggered the board to move against Mullenweg. WP Engine’s lawsuit has increasingly become a fight not over trademarks, but over evidence. 

When a company expects to be sued, it’s legally required to preserve anything relevant: emails, texts, chats. WP Engine says that obligation began for Automattic in July 2024. But after more than a year of exchanging evidence, Automattic had turned over just 16 of Mullenweg’s Telegram messages, one Signal conversation and no WhatsApp messages, according to the filings. Mullenweg lost a phone while traveling and can’t locate a laptop, and his phone wasn’t fully copied until around March 2026, the filings say.  

In September 2024, as the fight began, Mullenweg urged people on X to contact him using “Signal with disappearing messages.” 

WP Engine alleges that Automattic’s lawyers made false statements about those messages twice in 2025, and has asked the judge to punish Automattic by throwing out its claims in the case. 

Automattic denies wrongdoing. In August, Andy Missan, the company’s legal officer, wrote in a post on Automattic’s website, titled “WRONG AGAIN,” that the missing messages were personal conversations with romantic partners and that nothing relevant to the case was lost. 
 
Lawyers who mislead a judge could “lose a license or face disbarment,” Painter said, though he added that attorneys who unknowingly repeat false information from a client are generally treated differently, especially if they correct the record quickly. 

Former employees offer competing pictures of how Automattic employees communicated internally. The former senior employee said the company’s rule was to put every decision on internal blogs anyone could read, and that he never saw anyone use Signal for work. Malhotra said work happened on Slack. But the former employee who worked closely with Mullenweg said mixing personal and work messaging was routine in the WordPress world, and that they knew of no company-wide rule against it. 

On the night of the board’s vote, Mullenweg posted that WP Engine’s lawyers “have a pretty good chance of getting a judge to say I spoiled evidence in a malicious way trying to hide something.”  

The hearing, on Oct. 7, went better for him than he had thought. “At the end of the day, I think it starts off with some problematic behavior from Mr. Mullenweg, but I’m just not seeing the rest of the story that would get me to a finding of spoliation,” Magistrate Judge Ajay Krishnan said. But Krishnan said a 2025 letter from Automattic’s then-lawyers, claiming they had taken “all reasonable steps” to preserve Mullenweg’s messages, “suggests a little bit more than what was actually done.” Mullenweg’s phone hadn’t been imaged until two weeks after that letter. 

“It’s not even just a little bit more. It was false,” WP Engine’s lawyer, Yury Kapgan, replied.  

Krishnan said he would issue a ruling shortly. 

The board’s move came about four weeks before that hearing. A special committee of three directors was formed. It included ex-CEO Schneider, former Yahoo! president Sue Decker, and Dunwoody. They voted to put Mullenweg on paid leave and named CFO Mark Davies interim CEO. 

The position of Davies was especially interesting. It was Davies who told a WP Engine board member in 2024 that Automattic would “go to war” to defend its trademark, according to WP Engine’s filings. Now he was usurping Mullenweg, who started that war.  

Mullenweg, meanwhile, told employees on Slack that Davies had “conspired” with the board, according to a TechCrunch report. He suggested on X and Reddit that Silver Lake, the private equity firm that owns a majority of WP Engine, was involved in a plan against him. And he posted on X seeking “great sysadmin and security researchers to hire really quick, no one from @automattic!” so he could move “some of my stuff currently hosted there, elsewhere.” In the same post, he said he “fully support[ed]” Davies as interim CEO.  That support was to be short-lived. 

During those hours, Davies and Missan signed each other’s severance agreements, worth about $8.15 million combined, TechCrunch reported. 

By Sept. 12, Mullenweg was back in charge. Schneider and Decker resigned, Dunwoody was removed, and Davies and Missan were fired.  

Mullenweg named his new board two weeks later. It includes science fiction author Hugh Howey, who wrote the books that the Silo TV series is based on; Andy Chan, an author, and co-founders of social app IRL, Krutal Desai and Henry Khachatryan. In public, this time, he’s played the episode for laughs. 

“Founder advice,” he wrote on X. “If you don’t have a coup attempt every few years, you’re not hiring strong enough leaders.” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com