Automattic's board sidelined Mullenweg. 33 hours later he was back and it was gone.
The board put the WordPress co-founder on paid leave on September 9 and named the CFO interim CEO. By September 12 Automattic said he had the board's full support. By September 14, TechCrunch reports, three directors and two executives were out. No reason for the vote has been given.
Paid leave on Wednesday, back in control by Friday, board gone by Monday. Automattic still has not said why.
Automattic runs WordPress.com and employs many of the core contributors to WordPress, the software behind roughly four in ten websites by W3Techs' count. On Wednesday, September 9, its board voted to put Matt Mullenweg, the WordPress co-founder who is also the company's CEO and chairman, on a paid leave of absence and named CFO Mark Davies interim CEO. TechCrunch and 404 Media both reported it that day from the company's own Slack. By Saturday evening Automattic had confirmed his return. By Monday, TechCrunch reports, the board that voted was gone.
Wednesday to Saturday
The resolution reached Mullenweg 50 minutes before the meeting, he wrote in a company-wide Slack message that 404 Media's Samantha Cole obtained, and his request for time to have lawyers read it was refused. He named the directors who voted: Davies, Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker. Schneider was Automattic's founding CEO and now runs Bluesky. Automattic's statement that day, per TechCrunch: "Matt Mullenweg is currently on leave from Automattic. Mark Davies, Automattic's CFO, will lead the company as interim CEO."
On Friday morning he told staff in Slack that the board was back in agreement and he was in control, TechCrunch reports, and that a lot had happened in the previous 48 hours that needed sorting out. He also removed other administrators from the company Slack. On Saturday, September 12, a spokesperson gave TechCrunch the line that ended the episode: "Matt Mullenweg is the chairman and CEO of Automattic, with full support of the board." Mullenweg's own count of the absence: 33 hours and 20 minutes.
Monday: who is left
TechCrunch's September 14 report, citing multiple unnamed sources plus public records, says Schneider and Decker resigned and Dunwoody was removed. Decker's LinkedIn now dates her board service as ending in September 2026; Schneider removed Automattic from the bio on his personal site. Mullenweg let go both Davies, the interim CEO of two days, and Chief Legal Officer Andy Missan, whose LinkedIn also shows him gone. Nobody involved has said why the board voted. Automattic has not said who sits on it now.
The context every report reaches for is the WP Engine litigation, which began with Automattic's demand for 8 percent of the hosting company's revenue and WP Engine's October 2024 suit alleging defamation and abuse of power, and which sits alongside the 159 employees who took a severance offer in 2024 and the WordPress.org contributor accounts Mullenweg deactivated. None of the reporting connects the vote to any of that directly. Mullenweg's posts referenced the case. The board's statement referenced nothing.
Why a build studio cares
We do not build on WordPress. Our stack is a static Next.js export on Cloudflare Pages, and that is on purpose. But when a vendor-built WordPress site comes to us for a Surface or Deep Audit, the vendor continuity section of that audit asks a question this week answered badly: who controls the platform your site depends on, and what happens if that changes over a weekend? WordPress.org itself is controlled by Mullenweg personally, and the company that employs the people who maintain it removed him as CEO, reinstated him, and lost its board, with no explanation at either end.
For a client on WordPress, none of this changes the software today. It changes the governance line in the report. A platform where the plugin directory, the update servers, and the trademark all route through one person's decisions was already a single point of control. As of this week it is one with a documented 33-hour gap.
Next step: read TechCrunch's September 14 report and 404 Media's account of the Slack messages, then TechCrunch's confirmation of the return. If a site you paid for depends on a platform whose governance you have never looked at, that is the vendor continuity check in a Full Audit; write to us at hello@gattyworks.com.