Matt Mullenweg Returns as Automattic CEO After Brief Ouster

#automattic #wordpress #ceo #tech

Originally published at https://tekmag.thsite.top/matt-mullenweg-returns-as-automattic-ceo-after-brief-ouster/

Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic, is back in charge after a two-day board standoff. The company's board put him on paid leave on September 9, 2026 and named CFO Mark Davies as interim CEO, then reversed the decision on September 11, with Mullenweg confirming he has regained control of the company.

Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, and Pocket Casts. The board and the products it maintains have spent 48 hours in a corporate fight that played out in public: statements from the board, posts on X, and messages inside the company's own Slack. The whole thing ran from a Wednesday to a Friday.

The headline is easy to say and hard to keep straight. Mullenweg out, Mullenweg in, in under three days. But the details are what matter. They show how much the company and the open-source project it funds have come to lean on a single person, and how thin the governance layer is when that person becomes the point of contention.

Key Takeaways

The board placed Mullenweg on paid leave on September 9, 2026, and installed CFO Mark Davies as interim CEO, then reversed course two days later.
Mullenweg told staff on Slack that "the board is back in agreement, and I'm in control of Automattic," and has called the episode "my fifth" coup attempt.
Mary Hubbard, WordPress' Executive Director, confirmed on X that Mullenweg is back as CEO, and the official WordPress account shared her post.
Davies' Slack account has been deactivated and Mullenweg removed the company's Slack admins as part of the reset.

What happened, day by day

On Wednesday, September 9, 2026, Automattic's board put Mullenweg on paid leave and named Mark Davies, the company's CFO, as interim CEO. A spokesperson confirmed both moves, and Mary Hubbard posted to the WordPress.org community the same day to reassure people that "Matt remains the leader of the WordPress project and I remain Executive Director of WordPress."

On Thursday evening, September 10, Mullenweg posted "Don't call it a comeback" with a link to the LL Cool J song and swapped his profile picture for a pirate hat and eyepatch. On Friday, September 11, he told staff over Slack that "the board is back in agreement, and I'm in control of Automattic." Hubbard confirmed the return on X, the official WordPress account shared it, and Mullenweg followed up with a blog post about buying a houseboat.

The board's move, and how Mullenweg pushed back

The ouster came from a board that includes Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker. According to the message Schneider posted to staff, "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."

Mullenweg did not take the move quietly. He says Davies "conspired" with the board members behind his back, and that he requested time to do a legal review of the decision, which the board did not grant. After the board reversed itself, the fallout was visible: Davies' Slack account was deactivated and Mullenweg removed the company's Slack admins, a small act of reassertion that signaled who held the levers now.

Back in control, with a pirate hat

The "Don't call it a comeback" post and the pirate imagery are Mullenweg's way of framing the return on his own terms: not a defeat he's recovering from, but a comeback he's choosing to announce. In the same breath he added a line about resilience that tells you how he reads the whole affair. "If you don't have a coup attempt every few years, you're not hiring strong enough leaders," he wrote. "I think this was my fifth."

The houseboat post the next day was a deliberate deflection, turning attention to something mundane after two days of drama. What it doesn't say is that the board's "back in agreement" is a reinstatement, not a clean resolution. The board that put him on leave is the same board that put him back, and nothing in the public record describes what, if anything, changed between the two votes.

What Automattic is, and why developers should care

Mullenweg founded Automattic in 2003, after co-creating WordPress, and the company has been the commercial backbone of the WordPress ecosystem since. It runs WordPress.com, the paid layer of the platform most developers deploy, along with Tumblr, WooCommerce, and Pocket Casts. For the people who build on WordPress, the company's leadership is not an abstract board matter; it shapes product direction, the open-source roadmap, and the paid tools you rent from it.

The commercial layer is where a lot of this plays out in practice. If you want to see how the hosting market around WordPress is filling out, our breakdown of managed WordPress, AI agents, and apps on a single platform is the current map of who is selling what to the same developers.

The tensions that were already there

This was not the first strain at Automattic. In 2024 the company ran a buyout in which 159 employees took the package and left, a move that landed during the same period of cost pressure that put the leadership in the crosshairs now. The company is also locked in a long legal fight with WP Engine over the WordPress trademark and royalty claims, a dispute that keeps the project's ownership structure in the news.

Founders and their boards don't stay on good terms only at Automattic. The same shape of conflict, a founder publicly taking a company to task after management decisions, is the one that produced the id Software walkout over layoffs at a major studio. When that happens, the person with the most public standing usually ends up the one who frames the story, and Mullenweg has spent the last few days doing exactly that. The one detail that keeps surfacing in speculation: Mullenweg's annual Burning Man trip ended around September 7, two days before the board moved.

Conclusion

For now, the headline is simple. Mullenweg is back, Hubbard has confirmed it, and the WordPress project's public leadership is unchanged. The open question is not whether he returned, it is whether the board that put him on leave has actually settled, or whether September's two days is the start of something the company has not yet described. Until someone lays out what changed between the two votes, the safest read is that Automattic is operating as it always has, with one founder at the center and the rest of the structure held in reserve.

Frequently Asked Questions

<h3>Is Matt Mullenweg still the CEO of Automattic?</h3>

  Yes. He was reinstated on September 11, 2026, two days after being placed on paid leave, and confirmed in Slack that "the board is back in agreement, and I'm in control of Automattic."



<h3>Why was Mullenweg put on leave in the first place?</h3>

  Automattic's board, including Toni Schneider, Ann Dunwoody, and Sue Decker, voted to place him on paid leave and named CFO Mark Davies as interim CEO. Mullenweg says he was asked to step away from the CEO role and that he requested time for a legal review the board did not grant.



<h3>What role did Mary Hubbard play?</h3>

  Mary Hubbard is the Executive Director of WordPress. She posted on X that she was "relieved and pleased to see Matt Mullenweg return as CEO of Automattic," and the official WordPress account shared the post. Earlier, on September 9, she had told the community that Mullenweg remains the leader of the WordPress project.



<h3>Does this change anything for people who use WordPress?</h3>

  Not directly. The open-source WordPress project is governed by the community and stays separate from Automattic's leadership shuffle. But because Automattic funds and maintains much of the commercial infrastructure around WordPress, developers who build on WordPress.com or its paid tools have a reason to watch how stable Mullenweg's position turns out to be.

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