Matt Mullenweg Just Rebuilt Automattic’s Entire Board, and Almost Nobody From the Old One Survived

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TL;DR: Automattic has a brand new board, three weeks after the old one tried to put CEO Matt Mullenweg on leave without telling him first and lost. The replacements include a bestselling novelist, two co-founders of an event startup Mullenweg backs, and a breakup recovery coach. The CFO and chief legal officer are both gone too, and Mullenweg has made clear none of it changes who actually runs the company.

Three weeks ago, Automattic’s board tried something bold. It voted to put founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg on paid leave, without giving him any warning first. That did not go the way the board planned.

Mullenweg found out, fought back, and was reinstated inside 33 hours. He is now finishing the rest of the job. This week, the parent company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, and Jetpack confirmed a completely rebuilt board of directors. Almost nobody from the old guard is still in the room.

The new lineup reads less like a typical Silicon Valley boardroom and more like a guest list from Mullenweg’s own life. Hugh Howey, the self-published novelist behind the Silo series, now has a board seat. He and Mullenweg reportedly first connected while hiking Spain’s Camino de Santiago. Joining him is Amy Chan, author of “Breakup Bootcamp” and founder of a heartbreak recovery company. Rounding out the new group are Henry Khatchadourian and Krutal Desai, co-founders of IRL, an event startup Mullenweg has backed personally. Three new advisers, Jaime Waydo, Matt Van Horn, and Hiten Shah, joined alongside them.

Gone from the board are Toni Schneider, who has since become Bluesky’s CEO, retired Army general Ann Dunwoody, and former Yahoo president Sue Decker. Automattic also parted ways with CFO Mark Davies and chief legal officer Andy Missan, the two executives most directly tied to the leave attempt.

Mullenweg has never pretended the boardroom fight was ever a fair fight to begin with.

“For purposes of Delaware law, I am the CEO, President, Treasurer, and Secretary,” said Matt Mullenweg, Automattic founder and CEO.

That is not just bravado. Mullenweg controls roughly 84% of Automattic’s voting shares, a structure most founders only dream about. It meant that once he decided the ouster attempt would not stand, the old board’s options narrowed to zero pretty quickly. A vote that might have ended a normal CEO’s tenure instead ended the tenure of everyone who cast it.

This is the second time in about two years that Automattic’s leadership has made outside headlines for reasons that have nothing to do with shipping code. The company spent much of last year in a public and legal fight with WP Engine over trademark licensing, a dispute that split parts of the open source WordPress community and made Mullenweg a lightning rod well beyond his own payroll. That fight cost him some goodwill among developers who otherwise had no stake in Automattic’s internal politics.

A boardroom coup attempt is a different kind of story, but it lands on the same core question. WordPress powers something like four out of every ten websites on the internet, and Automattic sits at the commercial center of that ecosystem through WordPress.com hosting, WooCommerce, and Jetpack. Agencies, freelancers, and small publishers who build on that stack do not get a vote on who sits on Automattic’s board, but they absolutely inherit the consequences when its leadership gets messy.

For now, the practical fallout looks contained. No product roadmap has been paused, no acquisition has been unwound, and Mullenweg is publicly framing the new board as a group of people he trusts personally rather than a typical mix of independent directors and institutional investors. Whether that reads as loyalty or as a warning sign probably depends on how much you already trusted his judgment before any of this happened.