Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by subscribed » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 6:58 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #104

datakan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a President make a big ordeal about leaving "for health reasons". His LinkedIn had him at a new company within a couple months doing the same thing. Had a CISO leave for "personal" reasons. Talked to him a couple years later and yeah, he was fired. Steal 20$ out of a cash register and make the local news. Waste a billion dollars at a corp and make insane decisions and ride out on a golden parachute. Its a fucked…

So you would prefer a media circus and investor scrutiny when your employer's executives are fired for failures or misconduct? This is likely to cause the price of the shares to drop, including any ESPP and stock grants you and your coworkers have vested. Is the satisfaction of seeing an executive dragged through the mud worth losing a chunk of your net worth to you, no matter how much the exec deserves it? I'd rathe…

Investigated, prosecuted and jailed (if necessary).

So all the people companies are better off, not just you and other shareholders.

You know, the opposite of two-tier justice system.

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

#332

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 7:05 PM UTC

ivraatiems wrote: post #329

adamziel wrote: post #320

I’ve been at Automattic since 2018. Reading this thread, I wanted to share a story. In 2022, Matt supported me and my work on WordPress Playground [1]. Playground was in its early days and most people were still questioning whether it did anything useful. I got skepticism from peers, social media, even from my direct lead at the time. Not from Matt. He encouraged me, promoted Playground, created an environment where…

Thanks for sharing your story. How do you feel about the more recent behavior, though - the WP engine lawsuit, the buyout, etc.? Does that align with the person you saw and knew back then?

[deleted]

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

#333

Post by reverius42 » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 7:06 PM UTC

fg137 wrote: post #242

jcarrano wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression was that the major argument against static site generators is the unfriendly UX for non-technical contributors to the site, and with LLMs that problem is completely solved.

I don't know how it's "completely solved" unless you can point me to an existing, complete solution. Providing a nice backend with a WYSIWYG editor and access control as well as varying level of customization is not a trivial problem for anyone, technical or non technical, and you can easily mess it up.

You don't need a backend. You don't even need a static site generator. Just sit a non-technical person in front of Claude Code and tell them to tell the computer what they want (including what the content should say). For something as simple as a static site (that the user can themselves look at and read) there's nothing to mess up -- if something looks out of place, a non-technical user can just tell the computer that and it will fix it. "Computer, add a page to the blog with this content: " -- "Computer, the banner looks weird on phones but not on desktop, please fix it."

My wife (no CS background, no programming experience, schooling in music and law) is about to submit her first several apps to the App Store. I don't think she has had to even look at a single line of code. Yes, they work.

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

#334

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

mcmcmc wrote: post #330

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird to see so many posters suddenly pop up that are anxious to protect investors (who have the access and means to protect themselves) at the expense of harming employees and workers. Glad to see you all getting into the ultra-capitalist spirit of Hacker News I guess?

Bad companies who do bad things should fail. Why are you so obsessed with protecting criminals from consequences? If an exec is sexually harassing employees should they still be protected? What if the bad behavior is abusing workers and committing wage theft? Should that still be swept under the rug? Forgive me for not really caring about the stock grants of people who are in the top 10% of earners. Actual working cl…

The person I was replying to talked about executives being fired with no reason given. So "protecting criminals" is something you pulled out of your own imagination and warrants no response. Have a nice day.

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

#335

Post by bsder » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 7:23 PM UTC

ubermonkey wrote: post #307

bsder wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably back room deal between Wordpress board/management and WPEngine board/management. It's a safe bet that WPEngine was destroying Wordpress legally simply because their CEO doesn't suffer from verbal diarrhea and actually shuts up when the lawyers tell him to. If you get Matt out of the way, you can ink a deal and resolve everything so that even if Matt pulls something else, there are contracts in place that can…

This is a completely reasonable take and I'm stunned you're getting downvoted for it.

Matt is a creature of social media and has a lot of minions and sockpuppets. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#336

Post by jasomill » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 7:41 PM UTC

lioeters wrote: post #294

voakbasda wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then, the founding fathers of the United States were all mentally ill. All of the greatest scientific minds that made breakthroughs in their field are mentally ill.

Sane people adapt themselves to the world. The insane ones persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the mentally abnormal. (Parody of a famous quote about "unreasonable man".)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

— George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists[1]

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26107/pg26107-images.ht...

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

#337

Post by mcmcmc » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #334

mcmcmc wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad companies who do bad things should fail. Why are you so obsessed with protecting criminals from consequences? If an exec is sexually harassing employees should they still be protected? What if the bad behavior is abusing workers and committing wage theft? Should that still be swept under the rug? Forgive me for not really caring about the stock grants of people who are in the top 10% of earners. Actual working cl…

The person I was replying to talked about executives being fired with no reason given. So "protecting criminals" is something you pulled out of your own imagination and warrants no response. Have a nice day.

That’s the whole point of why they should disclose, because you don’t know if it’s poor performance or something legitimately bad. I simply gave examples of something that I don’t think anyone with a conscience would support. You very much give the impression that you would prefer scandals hidden, regardless of legality, because that’s what’s best for your pocketbook.

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

#338

Post by chuckadams » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC

slyall wrote: post #205

garbagepatch wrote: post #13

Here is the whole saga until May 2025: https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...

There is also this video that dropped last week if people are interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC8zIESRyVs " WordPress powers about 41% of the internet. It took Matt Mullenweg twenty years to build that. It took him about ninety days in 2024 to lose the trust of the community he built it with — the agencies, plugin developers, hosts, and translators who bet their businesses on the update button still worki…

The community was already starting to turn on Matt well before 2024. He's appointed himself release manager for every version of WP since 5.0 in 2018, which is how Gutenberg managed to land in core in such a half-baked state.

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

#339

Post by dofm » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 8:00 PM UTC

rurp wrote: post #315

monkey_monkey wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, absolutely not.

An experienced runner can almost always tell if another person is an experienced runner by watching them run or hearing them talk about the activity. Same for a mathematician, or a car mechanic, or a software engineer. I don't see why the experience of mental illness would be different from every other kind of experience.

To be fair, it is different because it impairs perception.

There's good evidence that depressed people are better at detecting simple sadness in others, and there's some evidence that depressed people are better at correctly predicting when things will have neutral or negative outcomes, but beyond that it gets a lot hazier, because depression messes with empathy, tends to project itself onto the world, and because non-depressed people will mirror your sadness when talking to you, etc. etc.

(I'm not talking about depression, though, but burnout, which is its own animal.)

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

#340

Post by photomatt » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 8:11 PM UTC

tshaddox wrote: post #146

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…

I'm no expert, but I suspect that a pattern of lashing out against opponents during in a high stakes business dispute would not typically be considered clinically significant on its own. I don't know how you or others in this thread are intending to use terms like "mental illness" or "mental health issues," but generally I don't think they're appropriate unless you're talking about problems where there's evidence of…

If you win (like Jobs against Flash/Adobe) you're a hero, if you lose people trash your name.

A lot of stupid people are swayed by the bots paid by the dark PR firms that PE engages to astroturf things and two-brain-cell "technical" YouTubers that have never optimized milliseconds off code that runs billions of times a day, never set up a rack that terabits flow through...