Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 296 posts

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#61

Post by [deleted] »

dofm wrote: post #35
Shank wrote: post #2

> “And the biggest news: I won't be able to make the ELT tomorrow,” Matt wrote in an Announcement Slack. He continued, writing that Mark Davies, current Automattic Chief Financial Officer, has “conspired” with Automattic Board of Directors members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.” If you’re doing this type of accusa…

He is surely very evidently mentally ill. This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for decades, as well as writing a big chunk of what was "early modern" WP. Before he came unglued. The fact that he looked, sounded, talked the way he did, was involved, put his own money where his mouth is, and was press-available to the extent he was is a lot of…

[deleted]

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#62

Post by dofm »

muglug wrote: post #48
dofm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is surely very evidently mentally ill. This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for decades, as well as writing a big chunk of what was "early modern" WP. Before he came unglued. The fact that he looked, sounded, talked the way he did, was involved, put his own money where his mouth is, and was press-available to the extent he was is a lot of…

> He is surely very evidently mentally ill. I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful. I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner. I suspect that many people, myself included, would struggle in similar situations. Occasionally a person can find themselves in a place where quitting is the best option for everyone involved, but the person at the centre is so dug in that they…

> I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful.

There are, to me, abundant signs that he is severely burned out, dysregulated and irrational.

(In this statement, in other statements, in his actions that wilfully worsened his own case against WP Engine, in his blog posts etc.)

These are mental health issues. I have experienced many of them myself (I am indeed recovering from them now) and do not know what else you could possibly call them.

He is very evidently experiencing continuing poor mental health. I don't know why the board would say "leave of absence" if they were not themselves alluding to his health. He clearly needs a break from the thing he does for his own benefit.

I absolutely wish him well and hope he steps back and takes care of himself for a while; none of this is worth worse health.

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#63

Post by telotortium »

SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #10
Shank wrote: post #2

> “And the biggest news: I won't be able to make the ELT tomorrow,” Matt wrote in an Announcement Slack. He continued, writing that Mark Davies, current Automattic Chief Financial Officer, has “conspired” with Automattic Board of Directors members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.” If you’re doing this type of accusa…

In recent memory of companies I've worked for, even the absolute WORST executives haven't gotten fired. They always announce that "it's time for another adventure" or "I am taking a break". So I am not shocked they didn't fire him, although the board is now probably wishing they did.

Those phrases often imply that they were fired or asked to resign - although the deniability can be useful, which is why they’re so often used. As a recent example, Fidji Simo went on leave from her role at OpenAI several months before leaving. Although I don’t know for sure, I would suppose that she was essentially fired when she went on leave, and the subsequent success of Codex after she went on leave confirmed the decision to fire her. It’s possible that, if Codex hadn’t been a success, she might have been brought back, so putting her on leave was useful for optionality.

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#64

Post by SwellJoe »

bellowsgulch wrote: post #6

Good, get him the fuck away from Wordpress. Though frankly, a better solution might be for businesses to ask themselves whether or not they need Wordpress anymore. In the mean time, if you're unable to derisk Mullenweg out of your business stack, this is a good first step.

WordPress dominance of the web has certainly peaked, but history indicates there will be several years in which to continue to extract comfortable profits while riding it down. e.g. Oracle, a database that almost no business has actually needed in decades.

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#65

Post by dzonga »

gkoberger wrote: post #8

Unfortunately, this is for the best. WordPress powers a large percentage of the internet, and I'm not sure what's going on with Matt (who I've always liked) but something turned the past few years. He's been behind unforced error after unforced error as CEO, and I hope a break helps him gain some perspective (although I don't see him being brought back). WordPress has been his life for 23 years. Doing the same thing…

em-dash by Cloudflare looks interesting in terms of replacing Wordpress.

by garnering enough of an ecosystem to cause a migration will be the bigger challenge.

of course some people will say in the age of agents will people need to visit websites ;)

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#66

Post by antonvs »

gkoberger wrote: post #19
biglyburrito wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Unfortunately "??

"Unfortunately", because Matt did a lot of good for the internet over the past two decades. WordCamp is (or was) really amazing, the community he built is really great, the Automattic Lounge was cool, he's donated millions of dollars to good causes, and WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet.

> WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet.

Unfortunately.

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#67

Post by kmeisthax »

dofm wrote: post #35
Shank wrote: post #2

> “And the biggest news: I won't be able to make the ELT tomorrow,” Matt wrote in an Announcement Slack. He continued, writing that Mark Davies, current Automattic Chief Financial Officer, has “conspired” with Automattic Board of Directors members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.” If you’re doing this type of accusa…

He is surely very evidently mentally ill. This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for decades, as well as writing a big chunk of what was "early modern" WP. Before he came unglued. The fact that he looked, sounded, talked the way he did, was involved, put his own money where his mouth is, and was press-available to the extent he was is a lot of…

I am saying this as someone who has had repeated and ongoing issues with WP Engine as a hosting platform: no, Matt Mullenweg was not even valid in his basic assumptions motivating his lawsuit against WP Engine. The idea that a hosting platform is leeching off the WordPress ecosystem is absurd, for two reasons:

1. WordPress is free and open source software, developed under reciprocal licensing (GPL). Hosting companies are neither legally nor morally obligated to contribute back to WordPress core. They are already a beneficial part of the ecosystem.

2. WP Engine was contributing back to the WordPress ecosystem, just not Matt Mullenweg's corner of it.

WordPress is a modular platform and plugin and theme developers are just as important to WordPress's continued success as core development is. WP Engine happens to own Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is basically WordPress's answer to the Drupal Fields API[0]. ACF is what lets you add arbitrary fields to WordPress's page edit screen without having to write a bunch of custom metabox hooks and forms. It was a huge timesaver before things moved to page builders[1] and it's still useful even if you're using a page builder.

[0] Formerly Content Construction Kit

[1] Full disclosure: I hate Gutenberg. It is not WordPress, it's a React development kit tumor shoved inside WordPress. Any other page builder would be preferable.

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#68

Post by nixosbestos »

0xDEADBEEFCAFE wrote: post #57
minimaxir wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire saga started due to WP Engine "forking" WordPress.

So problem solved? My only criticism is that 1) Mr. Mullenweg should have held tighter controls over the IP and 2) the direction to the community that they are encouraged to use "WP" as a prefix for their business names and products was ultimately a bad one leading to this mess..

Matt, ... just log out and take a break.

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#70

Post by kmeisthax »

minimaxir wrote: post #42
0xDEADBEEFCAFE wrote: post #33

Anyone could have forked WordPress at any time or spun up their own multi tenant instances if they were truly concerned, this just seems personal. It’s a bad day for founders IMO.

The entire saga started due to WP Engine "forking" WordPress.

WP Engine's "forking" consisted of disabling the revisions feature by default.

As someone who's personally been bitten by this particular WP Engine misfeature, describing this as a "fork" is disingenuous at best. The average Linux distro ships way more out-of-tree changes than WP Engine ever did.

Post reply on HN