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

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

#171

Post by shakna »

stackghost wrote: post #135
dofm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

It just sounds like the behaviours of an unprofessional douchebag to me, not mental illness

But when the same person was extremely professional, kind and helpful, six months before a sudden shift in behaviour?

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

#173

Post by hodgesrm »

telotortium wrote: post #63
SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

People go on leave regularly for health reasons, and Fidji Simo has been quite open about her health. Unless you have evidence of your claim, the official explanation is simplest. That's especially the case here since firing someone on health leave can expose you to lawsuits under labor law in the US and many other countries.

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

#174

Post by hodgesrm »

munificent wrote: post #110

> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.” This line is so perfectly on the nose it could be in a McSweeney's article and yet here it is in reality. We are truly on the weirdest timeline.

Given the long lines and the mud this year my "idea" would be to skip future festivals.

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

#175

Post by Yizahi »

dofm wrote: post #62
muglug wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

You are forgetting that he is a rich and famous person. Those people can't be mentally ill, they can be eccentric, bizarre, funky or outlandish. But never actually mentally ill, that word is reserved for the plebeians like us.

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

#176

Post by ChallengeEup237 »

bigiain wrote: post #59
chris_wot wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reason needed?!? We can all see what he’s done!

I agree, but there's still a big "Why now?" question in my head. I suspect the board knows of something even more spectacularly stupid he's about to do.

There is a hearing on Sep 30 as part of the WPE vs Automattic/WP trial where they will decide of Matt allegedly destroyed evidence. Matt apparently had automatic deleting messages enabled on his platforms, even throughout the period where they were supposed to be preserving it. His side said it was due to his "romantic partners", but his lawyers argued during the whole time everything had been preserved when it appears it wasn't. So the result of that hearing may came with a pretty big bill attached to it for all the legal time that was wasted for the other side, as well as instructions for the jury etc to assume the evidence was all harmful. So the timing might be related to that.

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

#177

Post by photomatt »

a012 wrote: post #139
SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See his other comments in HN in the previous wp “incident”, simply said he _is_ nut

[flagged]

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

#179

Post by ChallengeEup237 »

rossriley wrote: post #150
nijave wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He tried to extort them. Hosting providers have been selling Wordpress hosting for years without "giving back" Does Wordpress "give back" to PHP and Linux?

Automattic are the biggest sponsors of the PHP foundation so they do give back there.

I think they gave like $100k as a donation, which is great. But they were demanding WPE I think for around 32 million a year or something nuts. You could argue PHP is way more important to WordPress than WPE is.

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

#180

Post by keybits »

Volundr wrote: post #79
dzonga wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Am I looking at the right thing? https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash > EmDash depends on Dynamic Workers to run secure sandboxed plugins. Dynamic Workers are currently only available on paid accounts. Upgrade your account (starting at $5/mo) or comment out the worker_loaders block of your wrangler.jsonc configuration file to disable plugins. Seems like a pretty poor replacement for WordPress, which will run on prett…

It can be deployed to a node.js server with sqlite https://docs.emdashcms.com/deployment/nodejs/

Not as simple as wp, but not tied to one hosting provider.

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