Curiosity Killed the Time

In September 2026, Automattic's board put founder-CEO Matt Mullenweg on leave, and within days he was back, announcing his return in company Slack. The episode's most cited fact, his claim to control 84% of Automattic's votes, is a number he has never corroborated outside a stage.

September 9–10: Automattic's board voted to place the company's founder and CEO on a paid leave of absence, naming CFO Mark Davies as interim chief. Mullenweg broke the news himself, in a Slack message to all staff, accusing Davies and directors Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker of having “conspired” against him. He wrote that he received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting and was denied time to have it reviewed by independent counsel. Automattic confirmed the move to both 404 Media and TechCrunch — with “full confidence” in the interim's leadership.

September 11: Mullenweg posted again to Slack: “Happy to announce the board is back in agreement, and I'm in control of Automattic.” He linked LL Cool J's “Mama Said Knock You Out.” Sources told TechCrunch that the interim CEO's Slack account had been deactivated, that Mullenweg had stripped other admins off the workspace, and that at one point he posted “I'm a pirate now” — a man who famously does not curse, cursing. Asked if he was trolling, he replied, “I'm not a troll I'm a pirate, obviously.”

September 12: The company issued a one-sentence statement: “Matt Mullenweg is the chairman and CEO of Automattic, with full support of the board and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well.” On the same day, TechCrunch reported it was “hearing” reports that board member Toni Schneider was stepping down, and that the board's composition “may still be in flux.”

That is the whole public record. Now let's look at what it refuses to tell us.

The number that explains nothing

The clean version of this story would be “a majority owner fired his own board.” Or “a hostile board finally escaped a founder.” Neither fits, because of one claim.

In October 2024, at TechCrunch Disrupt, Mullenweg said — as TechCrunch itself reported — that he holds 84% of vote control at Automattic. An independent WordPress-ecosystem outlet, The Repository, rendered the same moment as him confirming “he votes 84% of the shares on the company's board.”

Hold that number up against this week and the questions write themselves:

• If a founder controls 84% of the votes, how does his own board place him on leave at all?
• If he could vote them off their seats — the ordinary consequence of that much control — why did he instead post to Slack like a man with no better tool?
• Why did the board act in a way that only makes structural sense if the 84% is, in a boardroom sense, not real?

There are two honest answers. The first is the distinction nearly every summary this week blurred: shareholder control is not board control. Directors vote one each — not weighted by the shares held behind them. A man who controls 84% of shareholder votes can generally elect the board; he does not get an 84% board vote. So three directors voting to sideline him is not, mechanically, contradicted by his claim. It is compatible with it.

The second answer is less comfortable: we do not actually know the number is true. Automattic is a private company. There is no proxy statement, no filing, no charter in the public record that corroborates 84 percent. The figure exists only because Mullenweg said it, on stage, in front of a questioner he was otherwise dismissing. That does not make it false. It makes it unsupported. The most reported fact of Automattic's power structure is, on inspection, one man's assertion — which is a strange thing to learn during a story about who actually controls the company.

The faction nobody consulted

Here is the second silence, and it may matter more.

Two of the three named directors, Ann Dunwoody and Sue Decker, have never — not this week, not before — made any public statement about any of this. Search the record. There is nothing. Their names appear only in the leaked Slack message attributed to Mullenweg, where they figure as the accused. They did not sit for interviews. They did not write letters. They did not speak to the reporters who asked.

Toni Schneider, the former CEO Mullenweg once chose to run his company, offered one internal line — reproduced in 404 Media's report, not issued by him publicly — about asking the interim CEO “to assume the role while Matt is out” and being “sure you will have many questions.” Then, per still-unconfirmed reporting, he may be stepping down. A man who is now the CEO of Bluesky did not respond to requests for comment about the company he once ran.

There is a reason this silence matters, and it is precise. In most boardroom fights, silence is the strategy: the people who know something don't say what it is until the lawyer or the later court filing does. But it also means that every explanation currently circulating — greed, structure, the WP Engine suit, a fearsome founder — is reconstruction, not leaked fact. We have the vote. We do not have the reason.

What a fair writer has to admit

A post like this can end one of two ways. It can pick a villain, which is tempting and would be liked. Or it can tell the truth about what it knows. Here is the balance as honestly as I can draw it:

• The timeline is solid. Everything recounted above rests on multiple independent outlets doing original reporting, plus the company's own statements.
• The one self-reported control figure is unverifiable, and — because of the distinction above — even if verified, it would not resolve this week's question.
• No actor is obliged to explain the reversal. The company's statement is one sentence from a spokesperson. The board's reasoning is nowhere.

What remains unanswered is not what people are saying. It is the thing no one will say. A company whose value has been marked down by BlackRock by over 80% from its 2021 peak, a founder claiming 84% and yet removed by a board that then gave him back, and not a single director speaking — that is not a story about getting fired and coming back. That is a story about whether control of the most important open-source infrastructure on the web really lives where it appears to survive.

Maybe the most telling fact of all is the one at the start: a man who swears he holds 84% of the votes chose, when his board acted, to argue in a company Slack. A person with real control does not announce “I am in control” into a chat window. He casts the vote.

That discrepancy — between the claim and the mechanism — is the real story, and no one in a position to resolve it has yet said a word.