Automattic has a new board after failed attempt to put CEO on leave

pinkmuffinere

1. Wow his profile picture is so extremely fluorescent 2. I guess I should move my blog off Wordpress

flerchin

It says he has 84% of the voting shares. Is there any possible way that the board could have been successful? Regardless of Mullenberg, (and I know he's controversial) a coup that is pre-ordained to fail seems like value destroying negligence.

bloudermilk

How does a CEO pull off resisting an ouster and firing the board?

xnx

Fireship pointed out that the board members gave themselves a generous severance package in the very brief interim, so that was very possibly the whole plan.

bastard_op

I'm surprised anyone still uses wordpress after this whole sh!tshow, but outside HN folks probably don't even know. Just reading about it about it puts me off from the product and company.

dj_rock

Come at the king you best not miss...

smoovb

Wordpress does not seem long for this world. How much of the Wordpress ecosystem is pure wasted resources, trying to be accommodating for all possibilities? As people see how easy Claude or Codex makes it to get off flat price Wordpress hosting and on to usage based platforms like Vercel, Wordpress usage will fade out. Feels like bloatware has no place in they coming world of AI customized software builds.

tecleandor

Looks like the Altman Maneuver...

rbanffy

Where is the Wordpress.org board to force him out? It seems he’s harming the project and the foundation much more than his company. I get the frustration, that it’d be nice of commercial entities that use our software to do more to support its development and maintenance, but that’s not in the license. A good project will create a healthy ecosystem with sufficient voluntary influx of resources. If it doesn’t, then maybe it’s no longer healthy or viable. There will be a time things like Python, FreeBSD, Linux, MySQL, and so many others we know and love, will have been surpassed by new successors better adapted to that time. We’ll cherish their memory, remind everyone of their role in taking us to that future, and move on.

hypfer

These will be words I will probably have to eat in the future (or when I research that guy's other opinions), but just based on the BS that was thrown at the guy in HN comments, this guy deserves respect for the power move of not giving a shit about these kinds of politics. Truly an impressive play.

gadders

If you come at the king, you better not miss (c) Omar Little

betteryet

How did the board plan pull this off if Mullenweg has 84% of the voting shares? For that matter, what is even the purpose of a board in a multi-class share structure with the founder holding above 50% voting shares.

rbanffy

Again, the one thing I love the most about Python is the lack of drama. I don’t want to be forced to practice Drama-driven Development.

photomatt

Howdy fellow hackers! If you want to see what's new, check out https://spacefast.com/ I came back not just because of the proxy, but because hundreds of top Automatticians messaged me about resigning or joining my next thing. I want what's best for all Automattic shareholders, which includes >80% of our employees. (We have a great internal stock system.) More than ever, the web needs an independent player making major investments in Open Source and technology that promotes freedom, liberty, and privacy. The week of all the drama, Automattic served 25 petabytes of traffic, had zero seconds of downtime, improved CSAT across all products, helped ~450k new websites be created, 20M new posts, 16M messages through Beeper, 1.1M journal entries in Day One, thousands of Open Source commits, blocked a ridiculous amount of spam and hacking, and did it with people working together across 83 countries! I could go on.

ceautery

Automattic was the most bizarre collection of chucklefucks I've ever had the displeasure of interacting with. They contracted with me to write a Wordpress plugin that would import Flickr libraries, which would have bankrupted anyone with a significantly large image set based on wordpress.com's pricing back in the Obama years. I never spoke to a single human being when I worked for them, and all of my technical questions in their Skype dev channel went unanswered. It feels insane to me that this is still a functioning company.