Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster

minimaxir

Discussion on the ouster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283

eclipticplane

I'm just glad to have my last projects off of Wordpress to get to no longer care about drama at Automattic that seems to never end.

autophagian

Has very little to do with the current brou-ha-ha, but I just realised its “Automattic” because his name is “Matt”. It’s like a veil over the world has been lifted.

JonAtkinson

This must be exhausting for the Automattic staff who just want to get on with their jobs.

legitster

> WordPress founder and a key advocate for the open source community This should probably say self appointed advocate. He really hasn't advocated for much beyond collecting payments to Automattic.

bedroom_jabroni

Damn it hasn't even been a week.

figassis

Is it perhaps time to ackowledge that boards where everyone is buddies can't actually do their jobs, yet they get paid obscene amounts of money?

xnx

Does Matt own >50%? If so, the board is irrelevant. If not, I assume he would've been gone long ago.

walrus01

Doesn't he control 84% of the voting stock or something? I'm curious how a board could even oust him in the first place. Or so he claims.

benatkin

It would have been just a matter of time before he displayed his power with the nonprofit and wordpress.com which he controls personally, independently of the Automattic board. Maybe that is part of why the board gave him his control of Automattic back so quickly.

VCFundedGenYer

When the CEO becomes a diva, the company has lost the plot.

pluc

i'm gonna wait to hear it from the people who were saying yesterday they were in control if that's ok > As of yet, no one at Automattic has heard a confirmation from the board. Mark Davies’ Slack account was also deactivated, sources said. mhm, ok.

lellow

Too much drama. Focus on the product and the users.

ttul

Most surprising in this article is the vibrant HDR magenta circle on Matt’s Twitter.

sillysaurusx

What is it about Automattic's structure that lets Matt stay in control? Even Travis got ousted at Uber, and he was the primary founder. Is the company set up in a way that makes removing Matt very difficult?

ebilgenius

> Mullenweg responded to our inquiry, saying a blog post is forthcoming. When it dropped, it was about him buying a houseboat.

throwawaymatt

Just when we (the WP community) thought things were settling down and cooler heads might be prevailing... this happens. Uhg, not great for someone who has invested over 15 years into building with WP and does (paid) business with an Automattic company.

testycool

Did someone make a site to track the timeline of the new WordPress situation, like they did with the WP Engine one?

dbg31415

Directus is great. And free for small organizations and non-profits. Just saying, there are plenty of good CMSs out there now. WordPress is junky AF, and the spat with WP Engine over... of all things... how they store backups... it was all so cringe. Felt like it boiled down to WP Engines saying, "We don't need to keep backups on the live server..." And WP saying, "Oh hell yeah you do, you can't have your own way to do rollbacks!" It was literally insane for them to fight about that.

CodeWriter23

What an absolute clown show. I don't see how anyone can trust WordPress (the company) going forward.