Automattic has a new board after failed attempt to put CEO on leave

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/25/automattic-has-a-new-board-after-failed-attempt-to-put-ceo-on-leave/

23•ilamont•59m ago

Comments

pinkmuffinere•32m ago

1. Wow his profile picture is so extremely fluorescent

2. I guess I should move my blog off Wordpress

eknkc•30m ago

How the hell does this look like it is burning a hole in my screen?

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1998201848008679424/OGH...

BalinKing•25m ago

It's an HDR image, I think.[0] At the moment, only some browsers show it as brighter—Firefox on macOS, for example, doesn't support HDR images and I had to open the page in Safari to see it for myself.

[0] see, for example, this submission from the front page a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49402521.

flerchin•25m ago

It says he has 84% of the voting shares. Is there any possible way that the board could have been successful? Regardless of Mullenberg, (and I know he's controversial) a coup that is pre-ordained to fail seems like value destroying negligence.

jordanb•22m ago

They could have known they wouldn't succeed but they could have decided their fiduciary duty requires them to either try or resign.

hoten•19m ago

Didn't they craft themselves a nice golden parachute if fired? Then proceeded to kick off events that would guarantee their dismissal?

That's less fiduciary duty and more hacking a payday.

collingreen•2m ago

[delayed]

doikor•17m ago

Yeah the minority share holders can’t sue them for not trying to do their job even if it lead to them getting fired. (They could have quit too)

If they truly believe the CEO was destroying the company/its value.

bloudermilk•24m ago

How does a CEO pull off resisting an ouster and firing the board?

doikor•22m ago

By personally owning 84% of the voting shares. This coup was doomed to fail from the start.

dylan604•8m ago

Being on the board is a Sisyphean effort based on the weighted voting setup. Some seem to be slower to realize this. At that point, they could quit and walk away with nothing, or as others have suggested, this could have been done deliberately to at least get a payday on the way out.

jordanb•19m ago

Apparently corporate structure gave him power over the board. Historically this kind of structure was considered undesirable and illegal in a public company, but beginning in the 2000s there was this idea that "visionary founders" should be able to demand absolute control, ex: Zuckerberg

VCFundedGenYer•13m ago

The same way Mark Zuckerburg does - he maintains majority control.

xnx•20m ago

Fireship pointed out that the board members gave themselves a generous severance package in the very brief interim, so that was very possibly the whole plan.

ImPostingOnHN•6m ago

That was my guess:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49692654

bastard_op•17m ago

I'm surprised anyone still uses wordpress after this whole sh!tshow, but outside HN folks probably don't even know. Just reading about it about it puts me off from the product and company.

slopinthebag•9m ago

its also hard to move off of

collingreen•3m ago

What makes it hard, these days?

I did plenty of WP back in the day and I agree, historically, but each of the strong answers I had in my mind (db integration, editor, plugins, themes) are weakened substantially by the AI agents' ability to port a working site to a new framework. I totally agree for normal users still but for devs taking jobs on this do you think the barriers to switching have come down in size?

sixothree•1m ago

It certainly is. But I won't be recommending it for new projects. Imagine how bad that would make you look.

chaosharmonic•9m ago

Yeah, I'm left-swiping anything that involves working on it, outside of maybe being interested in helping people migrate to anything else. I don't know enough PHP to maintain one anyway, don't like what little of the language I do have exposure to, and want nothing to do with this toxic ecosystem.

dj_rock•10m ago

Come at the king you best not miss...

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