Written by Admin Alex · Fact-Checked by M.Ali · Info Verified September 2026
We review and update this article regularly as new information becomes available.
TL;DR: Automattic’s board put founder Matt Mullenweg on paid leave September 9. His CFO, installed as interim CEO, signed a reciprocal $8.15 million severance package with the company’s chief legal officer the very next day. Mullenweg was reinstated 33 hours after his removal, fired both men on the spot, and is now trying to get the severance deals thrown out.
Here’s a boardroom drama that moved faster than most people’s weekend plans.
September 9: Automattic’s board votes to put Matt Mullenweg, the company’s founder and CEO, on paid leave. No public explanation. CFO Mark Davies steps in as interim CEO.
September 10: With Mullenweg out of the building and Davies now in charge, Davies and Chief Legal Officer Andy Missan sign reciprocal severance agreements with each other. Twelve months of base salary as a lump sum. Accelerated equity vesting. The right to exercise vested stock options. One extra year of health coverage. Combined, the two packages come out to $8.15 million.
September 12: Mullenweg is back. Thirty-three hours after being pushed out, he’s reinstated as CEO. His first move is firing both Davies and Missan.
The part where the story gets messier
Mullenweg isn’t just angry about the timing. He’s alleging Davies conspired with three board members to engineer the whole thing, and he says he was given only fifty minutes’ notice before his removal, with no real chance to get independent legal advice before the board acted. Whether that holds up as a formal legal claim or ends up being the framing Mullenweg uses in public is still an open question, but it tells you how he views what happened in that window.
Now Automattic’s legal team, backed by newly retained outside counsel at Susman Godfrey, is trying to figure out whether those severance agreements Davies and Missan signed for each other actually have to be honored. The optics are rough regardless of how the legal fight goes: an interim CEO used his brief window in charge to sign off on a payout for himself and the company’s top lawyer, hours after the founder got pushed out, and did it fast enough that the ink was dry before that founder could even try to come back.
It’s worth noting Davies didn’t hold Automattic stock when he left, though he kept substantial vested options from his time there. That detail matters for how much the accelerated vesting piece of his severance is actually worth versus just the guaranteed cash portion.
Why this matters beyond the boardroom gossip
Automattic runs WordPress.com, owns a controlling stake in the WordPress open source project’s trademark and infrastructure, and operates Tumblr, WooCommerce, and a long list of tools that a huge slice of the web depends on to stay online. A publicly messy leadership fight at the company steering that much infrastructure isn’t just a founder-drama story, it’s a governance story for an outsized piece of the internet’s backend.
Mullenweg has run Automattic with an unusually personal, sometimes combative style for two decades, famously clashing publicly with hosting rival WP Engine last year in a fight that spilled into the WordPress community itself. A board willing to move against him this fast, even briefly, suggests internal tension that’s been building longer than 33 hours.
Bottom Line
Whatever the legal outcome on those severance deals, the sequence of events here, a company sidelines its founder, the interim leader immediately cuts himself an eight-figure exit package, and the founder claws his way back in under two days, is the kind of story that makes every board member at a founder-led company slightly more paranoid about who they let run things while they’re out of the room. Watch whether Automattic actually manages to void those agreements. That ruling will say a lot about how much power an interim executive really has during a leadership vacuum.
