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 pushed founder Matt Mullenweg into a leave of absence on September 9 and reportedly installed the company’s CFO as interim CEO. By September 11, Mullenweg was telling staff on Slack he was “back in control,” and Automattic confirmed the next day that he is CEO again. The whole boardroom drama ran its course in about 72 hours.
On Wednesday, September 9, Matt Mullenweg was, by any normal corporate accounting, out. Automattic’s own board of directors forced him into a leave of absence and reportedly handed the CEO chair to the company’s CFO as interim leader. Two days later he was messaging staff directly on Slack, saying he was “back in control.” One day after that, on September 12, Automattic made it official in a company statement. Mullenweg is CEO again.
Three days. That is roughly the shelf life of this ouster.
A Boardroom Coup That Didn’t Take
The details of why the board moved on its own founder have not been made fully public. What is known is the shape of it: a leave of absence, a CFO stepping in as interim chief, and then a reversal so fast it barely had time to generate a press cycle before it was undone. Reporting has framed it as a power struggle inside the boardroom, a “stunning power shift” that apparently shifted right back.
Boards remove founders. It happens. Usually it sticks, at least for a while, because the founder has been eased out of day to day control over time. That is not really the situation at Automattic.
The Irony Sitting in the Middle of This
Matt Mullenweg co-created WordPress. His name is not just attached to the company that monetizes it, it functionally is the brand, in a way that is unusual even by founder-CEO standards. Automattic owns WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and Day One. Mullenweg also sits at the center of WordPress.org, the open-source project that technically operates separately from Automattic but that he has steered with enormous personal authority for two decades.
Trying to remove a person like that is not like replacing a normal executive. You cannot fire the gravity a founder has over an ecosystem just by voting on it in a boardroom. This week’s events look like a reminder of that, whether or not that was the lesson the board intended to teach.
He is also no stranger to WordPress-world controversy. Anyone who followed his very public 2024 and 2025 feud with hosting company WP Engine already knows Mullenweg does not shy away from a fight, publicly or otherwise. That history matters here mostly as context. It shows a pattern of a founder willing to fight hard for control, which makes a board thinking it could simply out-vote him look, in hindsight, a little naive.
What Actually Changed, and What Didn’t
Functionally, very little changed for WordPress users, agencies, or hosts this week. The product did not go down. Releases did not stop. What did happen is a visible crack in Automattic’s governance, the kind of thing customers and partners tend to notice even when it resolves quickly. A board that tries and fails to remove its CEO in 72 hours has told the market something about its internal state, regardless of who ends up in the chair.
For a site like this one, running on WordPress ourselves, that matters beyond the gossip value. Automattic’s stability, or lack of it, touches WordPress.com hosting, Jetpack security tooling, and WooCommerce stores that a huge share of the open web depends on. A CEO getting pushed out and reinstated inside a single week is the kind of event that belongs on the radar of anyone who builds on this stack, not just people who follow Silicon Valley personnel drama for sport.
Bottom Line
A board tried to remove the one person whose name is basically synonymous with the product itself, and it lasted about as long as a long weekend. That is not really a story about Matt Mullenweg surviving a coup. It is a story about a board apparently misjudging how much of Automattic’s identity, and possibly its pull over WordPress.org, runs through one founder who was never going to leave quietly. Expect the underlying tension, whatever specifically triggered it, to resurface. Boardroom fights like this rarely end because everyone shook hands and moved on. They end because one side won this round.
