The most expensive 33 hours in WordPress history...

Fireship

Summary

This video details the chaotic 33 hours when the board of Automattic attempted to fire CEO Matt Mullenweg while he was at Burning Man. Despite a structured effort to replace him, Mullenweg leveraged his 84 percent voting power to dismantle the board and regain control immediately. The power struggle highlights the complexities of open source governance, the legal tensions with WP Engine, and the costly financial impact of executive severance agreements triggered during this brief corporate coup.

Chapters

  1. 0:00Automattic leadership crisis background
  2. 0:58Board of directors vs CEO
  3. 1:27The surprise ultimatum
  4. 1:53The removal of Matt Mullenweg
  5. 2:03The retaliation strategy
  6. 2:11Connection to WP Engine legal battles
  7. 2:49The shift to pirate persona
  8. 3:16Exercising majority voting power
  9. 3:30The restoration of power
  10. 3:49Firing the executives
  11. 4:12The eight million dollar mistake
  12. 4:16Employee confusion

Topics covered

  • Automattic corporate governance
  • The failed boardroom coup

+4 more topics (full content when you follow the channel)

Transcript excerpt

Earlier this month, while I was migrating my WordPress blog to Kubernetes, the board of directors at Automattic, the company behind other companies like wordpress.com, Tumblr, and WooCommerce, that has two T's in its name for its founder Matt, they tried to pull an open AI and fire their founder out of nowhere. And just like at Open AI, on paper, it went great. The CFO got a promotion to CEO, the company issued a statement saying the board had full confidence in him, and employees told TechCrunch they were ecstatic. But they underestimated that that co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, who co-created WordPress at 19 years old and has spent the last 2 years in an ugly legal war with WP Engine, has a martyrdom complex that would make Al-Qaeda proud. >> One thing is if you're really open in open source, sometimes you have to stand up to bullies and you have to fight to protect your open source ideal…