Automattic Board Puts WordPress Co-Founder Matt Mullenweg on Paid Leave

Matt Mullenweg told Automattic employees on Wednesday that he would miss the next day’s meeting. In a Slack message visible across the company, the WordPress co-creator said he had received a board resolution just 50 minutes before the directors met. He asked for time to consult independent legal counsel.

The board had voted to put him on paid leave.

Automattic confirmed the leave on September 9, naming finance chief Mark Davies interim CEO while Mullenweg remains a director. The change puts the commercial company under new management during its continuing lawsuit with hosting rival WP Engine, while leaving Mullenweg in charge of the separate WordPress project.

Toni Schneider, who ran Automattic from 2006 to 2014 before Mullenweg took over, confirmed the decision on the company’s internal message board. Mullenweg named Schneider among the directors who voted for the leave, alongside Davies, Ann Dunwoody and Sue Decker. He voted against it.

No source states why the board acted now. Mullenweg’s account of the notice he received and his denied requests for independent counsel has not been independently confirmed.

The company and the project

WordPress is free, open-source software for building websites. Automattic is a separate business that sells hosting through WordPress.com. Other companies, including WP Engine, sell hosting for the same software.

Mullenweg leads the software project and personally controls WordPress.org, the website and distribution servers through which users obtain plugins and themes. Those servers matter when a website needs an update. Automattic’s board can change who runs the hosting business without changing who controls that distribution service.

Mary Hubbard, the WordPress project’s executive director, sent the community that distinction on the day of the vote. She joined the project after heading governance and experience at TikTok’s U.S. operation. Her message said Mullenweg remained the project’s leader and that its work would continue as planned.

The dispute over payment

In September 2024, Mullenweg called WP Engine “a cancer to WordPress” and demanded a trademark licence costing 8% of the host’s monthly gross revenue, a demand he estimated at roughly $32 million. He accused the company of profiting from WordPress without contributing enough to its development.

The demand reached a courtroom that November. Before Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, WP Engine’s attorney challenged the calculation: “That’s not how you calculate a royalty. That’s how you set a ransom.”

Automattic’s attorney pointed to an alternative in the proposed licence: WP Engine could provide volunteer hours equivalent to the payment. Mullenweg had also referred to negotiating the terms the following week. Martínez-Olguín said she was inclined to grant an injunction, but found WP Engine’s proposed terms too vague.

WP Engine had sued that October, accusing Automattic and Mullenweg of defamation and abuse of power. Automattic filed counterclaims in October 2025 alleging trademark misuse. WP Engine maintains that its use of the WordPress name describes the software its customers use.

The fight now includes a dispute over missing messages. On July 28, 2026, WP Engine asked for sanctions, alleging that Mullenweg and Automattic destroyed evidence on Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp and seeking dismissal of Automattic’s counterclaims.

Automattic’s opposition says the disappearing messages identified in the record were personal communications with romantic partners, unrelated to the case. In its August response, the company said 1.5 million documents had been reviewed and five of Mullenweg’s devices imaged. “WP Engine cannot identify a single missing message about anything having to do with this case,” it said.

Employees and website owners

Inside Automattic, disagreement had already produced departures. By October 4, 2024, 159 employees, about 8.4% of staff, had accepted an offer to leave if they disagreed with Mullenweg’s direction. The package paid $30,000 or six months’ salary, whichever was higher. Daniel Bachhuber, who headed WordPress.com, and Naoko Takano, who ran programs and contributor experience, were among those who left.

On April 2, 2025, Automattic cut about 16% of its workforce, roughly 280 people, reducing headcount from 1,777 to 1,495. Mullenweg’s memo said revenue was growing but the company needed to improve profitability.

Outside the company, WordPress’s share of websites fell from 43.6% in mid-2025 to 42.2% in May 2026 in W3Techs measurements. Those figures do not establish why users changed software.

Rayhan Arif, a WordPress business person who examined tweets and blog posts about people moving to the rival Astro framework, doubted some departure accounts. He wrote: “But when I dig a little deeper, I often don’t see any prior conversations or context showing those people were actually using WordPress in the first place.” He suggested the posts felt “like a coordinated narrative” and wondered whether companies might be incentivizing the messaging for their own business gains.

Other developers pushed back. David V. Kimball wrote: “No, I’ve been pushing people away from WordPress to Astro before it was cool, starting about two years ago.”

Daniel Schutzsmith, a former WordCamp organizer who had built hundreds of WordPress sites, said six clients’ sites hosted on WP Engine had been disrupted by Mullenweg’s actions. He described growing difficulty persuading enterprise customers to choose WordPress.

For the people still maintaining the project, Hubbard’s Wednesday message set out the immediate plan: “Matt remains the leader of the WordPress project and I remain Executive Director of WordPress. Our teams, priorities, and work continue as planned.”

Germany's Soofi S AI Model Tops All Open-Source Rivals on German Benchmarks

A German research consortium coordinated by the KI Bundesverband released Soofi S, an open-source German-English foundation model, this week, according to its pretraining report. In the team's tests,

The Implicator

A Raspberry Pi Is the Durable Way to Run OpenClaw as Labs Narrow Model Access

OpenClaw, the open-source framework for running a personal AI assistant on hardware you control, shipped release 2026.5.27 on May 28. The repository now carries more than 375,000 GitHub stars, up from

The Implicator

Meta Plans to Open-Source New AI Models but Will Keep Its Most Powerful Closed

Meta is preparing to release its first AI models developed under chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, with plans to eventually offer open-source versions, Axios reported Monday. Before any public release,

The Implicator

Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai