The Board Coup at WordPress: Automattic Puts Matt Mullenweg on Leave, CFO Takes Over

For most of the past two decades, Matt Mullenweg has been the undisputed center of gravity of the WordPress universe. The co-founder of the software that powers over 40% of the web, founder and CEO of Automattic since 2014, and the man who personally decided what did and did not happen in the project’s ecosystem — right down to blocking an entire hosting company from accessing WordPress.org resources. On September 9, 2026, that era of unchecked authority came to an abrupt end: Automattic’s board of directors voted to place Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence, against his will, and handed the interim CEO role to the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Davies.

The news landed via a company-wide Slack message on Wednesday, first reported by TechCrunch and 404 Media, both of which reviewed the internal communications. According to the reports, Mullenweg wrote that board members had “conspired” behind his back to vote him out of day-to-day operations. A follow-up email to stakeholders was more measured in tone: “Matt Mullenweg is currently on leave from Automattic,” it read. “Mark Davies, Automattic’s CFO, will lead the company as interim CEO.”

What actually happened

The mechanics of the move are unusual for a company of Automattic’s profile. Mullenweg remains a board member — and, notably, a controlling shareholder — meaning the leave of absence strips him of operational authority while leaving his structural power over the company intact. According to internal communications described in the reporting, Mullenweg would “remain a board member and he will have a voice in setting direction and making decisions,” a detail that drew immediate skepticism from WordPress community members who have spent two years watching him exercise exactly that kind of influence from multiple seats of power simultaneously.

Mark Davies is not a newcomer parachuted in to steady the ship. He has been Automattic’s CFO since 2019, when Mullenweg personally recruited him from Vivint Smart Home. In an odd historical footnote, Davies was also a central figure in the earliest stages of the WP Engine conflict: it was Davies who met with Silver Lake managing director Lee Wittlinger in September 2024, weeks before the dispute that would eventually embroil the company in litigation exploded into public view.

The board’s decision caps more than two years of escalating turbulence that began in September 2024, when Mullenweg launched a public crusade against WP Engine, accusing the hosting company of freeloading off the open-source project and demanding an 8% royalty on its WordPress-related revenue. The campaign included a now-infamous “golf course and yachts” speech at WordCamp US, the removal of WP Engine’s access to the WordPress.org plugin repository — which broke plugin updates for a large slice of the hosted web — and a nine-figure lawsuit filed by WP Engine in October 2024 alleging defamation, abuse of power, and intentional interference with contract. A judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction later that year, and the litigation has since expanded in scope, with filings in 2026 revealing Automattic allegedly planned to target as many as ten competitors with similar royalty demands.

Why the board acted now

Neither Automattic nor the board has published a detailed explanation for the timing. But the pressure vectors are not hard to identify.

The legal exposure is the most concrete. The WP Engine suit is still grinding through federal court, with both sides trading accusations of withheld and destroyed evidence as recently as May 2026. Keeping a CEO who is personally named in the complaint — and whose public statements form the core of the defamation claims — at the operational helm is a litigation-risk posture that most boards would find untenable. Notably, Mullenweg told the media in a recent interview that he regretted saying “WordPress.org just belongs to me personally,” a statement that featured prominently in the plaintiffs’ arguments about concentrated, unaccountable control.

Then there is the talent and morale ledger. In late 2024, 404 Media documented an environment of “paranoia and fear” inside Automattic after Mullenweg offered a controversial buyout to employees who disagreed with his WP Engine campaign — around 180 people accepted and left. Attrition on that scale, at a fully distributed company of roughly 1,447 employees that has no offices to hold people together, is a structural wound. And in April 2026 Mullenweg himself spent hours posting in WordPress community Slack channels describing the project’s release culture as producing “boring or mediocre crap,” a broadside against his own community that made headlines precisely because it came from the person nominally responsible for that culture.

Finally, there is the AI-shaped shadow over everything. WordPress’s dominance was built in an era when publishing meant a CMS. Today, an increasing share of content discovery starts in AI chatbots rather than search engines, AI site builders compress the time from idea to published page to minutes, and the economic value of being “the software behind 40% of the web” looks different when much of that web’s traffic is being intermediated by GPT, Claude, and Gemini. Automattic’s own AI efforts — the Jetpack AI Assistant embedded in the block editor, AI website-builder flows on WordPress.com — have been real but incremental, shipping features rather than repositioning the platform. A board watching the ground shift under a $7.5 billion-valued company may reasonably have concluded that the WP Engine war was a costly distraction from a much larger strategic question.

What it means for WordPress

The immediate practical effects for the platform’s millions of users are likely minimal. WordPress the open-source project is formally separate from Automattic the company, releases continue on their schedule, and the plugin ecosystem functions — mostly — as before. Mark Davies as interim CEO signals continuity of operations over strategic reinvention, at least initially.

The deeper questions are about governance and trust. The WordPress community has spent two years asking who, if anyone, could hold Mullenweg accountable when his personal decisions could break plugin updates across the web or freeze a hosting company out of the ecosystem. The answer, it turns out, was his own board — or at least enough of it to force a vote. Whether that proves to be a genuine transfer of authority or a temporary cooling-off period depends heavily on factors outsiders can’t yet see: the terms of the leave, the duration, and whether Mullenweg, still a director and still the controlling shareholder, chooses to treat it as binding.

For the broader open-source world, the episode is a case study in the fragility of “benevolent dictator” governance at scale. WordPress joined Linux, and every project that ever depended on a single individual’s judgment, in discovering that the model works right up until the individual’s judgment becomes the risk. The difference is that WordPress’s moment of reckoning arrived through a corporate boardroom vote, not a community process — a reminder that for much of the open-source fabric of the internet, the real power structures are corporate ones, and they behave like it.

What to watch

Three signals will tell us whether this is a real regime change or a pause. First, who speaks for WordPress.org — the trademark-adjacent, Mullenweg-controlled foundation and infrastructure — in the coming weeks; operational control of Automattic does not automatically transfer control of the project’s central services. Second, whether the WP Engine litigation posture changes under Davies, particularly any move toward settlement that Mullenweg had publicly resisted. Third, whether the board makes the interim arrangement permanent, or searches for an outside CEO — which would be the clearest signal yet that the Mullenweg era, at least operationally, is over.

What is already clear is that the most turbulent chapter in WordPress’s twenty-three-year history has produced its most dramatic corporate consequence. The man who co-created the software running nearly half the web, and who spent two years bending that ecosystem to his will, has been told by his own board to step away from the wheel.