The King Is On Paid Leave: Automattic's Board Finally Took The Keys Off Matt Mullenweg

There is a particular kind of corporate sentence that only ever means one thing. "Paid leave of absence" is that sentence. Nobody has ever been placed on a paid leave of absence and then come back to a larger office.

On Wednesday 9 September 2026, Automattic's board of directors voted to remove Matt Mullenweg from day-to-day control of the company he founded in 2005. Mark Davies, the Chief Financial Officer, was made interim CEO. Mullenweg voted against it. He lost. He then did the single most Mullenweg thing available to him and announced it himself, in a Slack channel visible to every employee.

“Mark Davies has conspired with Ann Dunwoody, Toni, and Sue Decker behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that. Wishing Mark and all of you the very best.”

He added a clarification: Davies had been voted interim CEO, the resolution reached him fifty minutes before the meeting began, and his repeated requests for time — "even a few hours" — to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel were denied.

Fifty minutes. Read that again. This is a founder-led company with a famously founder-friendly share structure, and the board moved on him with less notice than a dentist gives you. You do not run an operation like that unless you are genuinely afraid of what happens if the target gets a lawyer on the phone first.

The facts, before the mythology sets in

404 Media broke it. TechCrunch confirmed it via the Slack messages. The Verge got a statement from Automattic spokesperson Megan Fox: "Matt Mullenweg is currently on leave from Automattic. Mark Davies, Automattic's CFO, will lead the company as interim CEO. The Board has full confidence in Mark's leadership and in the team's ability to execute against the company's priorities."

The named directors are Ann Dunwoody, Sue Decker, and Toni Schneider — who, and this is the detail worth pinning to the wall, was Automattic's CEO from 2006 to 2014 before handing the chair to Mullenweg. Schneider's own message to staff was almost gentle:

“Automattic's board has decided to ask Matt to step away from his CEO role and take a leave of absence. We have asked Mark Davies to assume the interim CEO role while Matt is out.”

Note the verb. "Asked." They asked him, in the way a bailiff asks. Mullenweg remains on the board. And Mary Hubbard, Executive Director of the WordPress project, moved fast to firewall the open-source side: "Matt remains the leader of the WordPress project and I remain Executive Director of WordPress. Our teams, priorities, and work continue as planned."

Which is a sentence designed to reassure and achieves the exact opposite. Automattic's board has just decided he is not safe to run a company. The WordPress project's response is that he is still perfectly fine to run the thing 40% of the web depends on.

Nobody said why. Everybody knows why.

The board gave no reason. Boards never do. So let us lay the timeline next to it and let the reader draw a straight line.

• →20 September 2024: Mullenweg stands on stage at WordCamp US in Portland and calls WP Engine a "parasitic entity". The next day his blog calls them a "cancer".
• →2 October 2024: WP Engine sues (case 4:24-cv-06917, Northern District of California). Trademark, tortious interference, defamation, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
• →Late 2024: wordpress.org bans WP Engine, forks their free plugin ACF into "Secure Custom Fields" and pushes it into client sites nobody asked. A preliminary injunction forces most of it back within 72 hours. Mullenweg says he is "disgusted and sickened by being legally forced to provide free labor".
• →2025: 159 employees — 8.4% of Automattic — take an exit offer. Naoko Takano, sixteen years the Japanese locale manager, resigns citing the conflict directly.
• →28 July 2026: WP Engine files a motion for sanctions alleging Mullenweg and Automattic destroyed evidence on Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp.
• →11 August 2026: unsealed filings reveal Mullenweg's phone was not forensically imaged until 17 April 2025 — nine months after the duty to preserve began, six months after suit was filed, and two weeks after Automattic told WP Engine's lawyers in writing that it had "taken all reasonable steps to preserve relevant documents". When it was finally imaged, none of his WhatsApp or Signal messages were captured. A phone was lost while travelling. A laptop's whereabouts are unknown.
• →9 September 2026: the board votes.

Automattic's public response to the sanctions motion was a late-night blog post titled "Wrong Again", calling the request "desperate" and explaining that the missing material was personal communications with romantic partners. Perhaps it was. But a board that has been told, in a sworn declaration from its own e-discovery vendor, that the CEO's devices are missing and his messages are gone, is a board with an insurance problem, a fiduciary problem, and a directors-and-officers-liability problem all arriving in the same envelope.

There is one more number that matters, and it is the one boards actually read. BlackRock led the 2021 round that valued Automattic at roughly $7.5bn — $85 a share. By 30 June 2025 BlackRock marked the same stock at $27.74. That is not a dip. That is roughly two-thirds of the equity value evaporating while the founder conducted a public war against a customer.

Who is Mark Davies, and what does his appointment tell you?

Everything, actually. Davies joined Automattic as CFO in October 2019 from Vivint, a Blackstone portfolio company he took public on the NYSE. Before that, EVP at Alcoa. Before that, twelve years at Dell, finishing as Managing Vice President of Strategic Programs reporting directly to Michael Dell. Mullenweg's own 2019 announcement said the quiet part with total sincerity: they hired him for "experience taking businesses from hundreds of millions in revenue to billions and even tens of billions".

So: an IPO guy. A carve-outs, cost-lines and investor-narrative guy. A man whose entire professional grammar is enterprise value.

When a board removes a visionary founder and installs the CFO — not a product lead, not a COO, not an outside operator with a growth mandate — it is not saying "we need a different vision". It is saying "we need the bleeding to stop and the numbers to become legible to buyers". Interim CFO-CEOs are appointed to tidy the house before the viewing.

Short term: three months of eerie calm

Expect, in roughly this order:

• →Silence. The Slack theatre stops. The 3am blog posts stop. Automattic's public voice becomes a communications team, which is duller and considerably harder to sue.
• →Settlement pressure. Davies has no ego investment in the WP Engine war. It is a line item, and it is a line item that has cost tens of millions in fees and immeasurably more in valuation. A negotiated exit becomes possible for the first time in two years — and if the spoliation sanctions land, the price of that exit goes up sharply, which is precisely why he will want it done before the ruling.
• →Cuts and focus. Expect a portfolio review. Tumblr, Pocket Casts, Day One, the incubator tail — anything that does not defend WordPress.com or WooCommerce revenue is now on a spreadsheet with a column headed "strategic fit".
• →Reassurance tours. WP Engine, Kinsta, Pressable's competitors, the big agencies: all of them get calls saying the adults are back. Some will believe it.

What will not happen in the short term is a change at WordPress.org. Mullenweg still holds the project, the trademark relationship through the WordPress Foundation, and the release keys. And that is the genuinely dangerous part of this arrangement.

The governance bomb nobody has defused

Follow the structure. In 2010 Mullenweg transferred the WordPress trademark to the nonprofit WordPress Foundation, which then licensed commercial rights back — exclusively — to Automattic. For sixteen years that arrangement worked because the same person effectively controlled both ends. That person has just been removed from one end.

So we now have the least stable configuration imaginable: a commercial company run by a board-appointed CFO, and an open-source project of enormous strategic value still personally led by the man that board just sidelined, holding the keys to the trademark that company depends on.

There is no clean way for this to stay still. Either Mullenweg's project authority gets formalised into something independent of him, or Automattic's board finds it is paying for a supply chain it does not control, run by someone with an active grievance. WP Engine has already asked the court to dissolve the WordPress Foundation. That request looked aggressive in June. It looks prescient now.

Long term: the succession WordPress never had

Here is my read, and it is speculation, clearly labelled as such.

Automattic will settle with WP Engine within twelve months, probably without admitting anything, probably with a trademark licensing framework that formalises what "WP" means and quietly ends the era of ad-hoc excommunication. That framework will be the single most consequential document in WordPress's history and almost nobody will read it.

Mullenweg will not return as CEO. Founders removed by their own boards after a two-year public conflict and an evidence-preservation scandal do not come back, and "remains on the board" is the standard anaesthetic applied on the way out. He will keep the project for a while, then be gradually structured out of it — a leadership council, an executive director with real authority, a foundation with independent trustees. He will call it maturity in public and something else in private.

And the ecosystem? The ecosystem stops waiting. That process already started: FAIR, the package manager launched under the Linux Foundation and led by Ryan McCue, exists precisely because one man could switch off the update pipe in a temper. AspirePress mirrors exist for the same reason. None of that infrastructure gets un-built because the board finally acted. Once you have built a spare key, you keep the spare key.

Which brings us to the part nobody at Automattic will say out loud: this does not fix WordPress. Market share is 40.7% of all sites and falling. WordCamp US 2026 sold around 440 tickets against 2,149 in 2023. Roughly 44% of the plugin directory is abandoned. A pre-auth RCE chain landed in core this year. None of those problems were caused by the CEO's temperament, and none of them are solved by removing it.

The honest verdict

I have spent two years writing that WordPress's central risk was governance — that a platform running 40% of the web should not be steerable by one man's mood on a Friday night. That risk has now been priced by the only people with the power to price it: the board, the investors, and the discovery process.

So this is good news, in the narrow sense that a tumour being identified is good news. Automattic will become a duller, better-run, more sellable company. It will stop attacking its own customers. It may even become pleasant to deal with.

But nobody removed a CEO because the product was too good. The board did not act to protect the community; it acted to protect a valuation that had already fallen by two-thirds and an evidence trail that had already gone missing. If you are still running a business whose entire delivery model depends on this platform, the lesson of 9 September is not "the adults are back". The lesson is that you were, for two full years, downstream of a decision-making process that a board of directors ultimately judged unsafe — and you found out about the intervention from a leaked Slack message.

Build somewhere the leadership crisis cannot reach your client list. That advice has not changed. It just got a date stamp.