Mullenweg Claims He's Back as Automattic CEO Two Days After Board Put Him on Leave, Company Still Hasn't Confirmed It

Two days after Automattic's board voted to place him on paid leave and hand the CEO job to chief financial officer Mark Davies, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg says he's back in charge. The company still hasn't said whether that's true.

According to Slack screenshots reviewed by TechCrunch and 404 Media, Mullenweg posted in Automattic's company-wide Announcements channel late Thursday night: "Happy to announce the board is back in agreement, and I'm in control of Automattic. A lot happened in the past 48 hours that we need to sort out, and I hope much of it was a misunderstanding, because I have huge respect and regard for those involved." He linked to LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out" and captioned it "(Don't call it a comeback)."

Mary Hubbard, Executive Director of WordPress.org, backed him up in a Friday post on X, shared by the official WordPress account, saying she was "relieved and pleased" to see Mullenweg return as CEO of Automattic. But Automattic's board itself has said nothing publicly since it confirmed to multiple outlets, including Computerworld and Search Engine Journal, that Mullenweg was on leave and Davies was interim CEO with "the Board's full confidence."

Mullenweg has also removed all Slack administrators from Automattic's workspace, and Davies' Slack account has been deactivated. Neither Davies nor Automattic responded to requests for comment from TechCrunch, 404 Media or The Verge. A spokesperson had earlier told The Verge that Mullenweg remained "currently on leave."

Mullenweg didn't clear anything up in a blog post published Friday under the headline "Major Life Announcement." The Verge and TechCrunch reported it was about him making an offer to buy a houseboat; 404 Media described it as a tugboat. Either way, the post said nothing about his actual status at the company, writing only that "no one will love a thing quite like the original owner, but sometimes you can find the perfect person to carry the torch."

On X, Mullenweg struck a defiant, almost gleeful tone. "If you don't have a coup attempt every few years, you're not hiring strong enough leaders," he wrote Friday, adding "I think this was my fifth." Earlier in the week he'd warned staff to "get ready for some National Enquirer rumors or hit pieces" and said he was hiring outside sysadmins and security researchers to move his personal data off Automattic's servers, while insisting he still "fully support[ed]" Davies as interim CEO. That position is hard to square with his later Slack message claiming he'd retaken control.

The unproven Silver Lake claim

According to Firstpost and TechCrunch, Mullenweg has suggested on both X and Reddit that Silver Lake, the private equity firm that holds a majority stake in WP Engine, was somehow involved in what happened to him. Automattic and WP Engine are locked in ongoing litigation that Mullenweg himself has called a "nuclear" war, and Search Engine Journal reported that Automattic also faces a sanctions motion accusing Mullenweg of failing to preserve evidence, including a laptop and phone the company's e-discovery vendor says are unaccounted for. No source has produced evidence tying Silver Lake to the board's leave decision, and neither Silver Lake nor Automattic's board has addressed the claim.

Search Engine Journal also reported a detail that frames the board's original vote in a harsher light for the company's side of the story: Mullenweg says he received the leave resolution just 50 minutes before the board meeting and was denied a request to have it reviewed by outside legal counsel, even for a few hours. Automattic has not disputed or confirmed that account.

What's actually unresolved

Computerworld's Frank Dickson, a principal analyst at Dickson Research, noted that regardless of who holds the CEO title at Automattic, Mullenweg personally controls WordPress.org, the plugin and theme repository millions of WordPress sites depend on for security updates, along with the WordPress trademark. "The company changed who runs its hosting business without changing who controls the distribution pipeline millions of those hosted sites still depend on," Dickson said.

The corporate power struggle, however it resolves, may matter less to ordinary WordPress users than to Automattic's own board and staff. What's still missing, as of Friday, is any on-the-record confirmation from Automattic's board that it reversed course, any explanation for why it placed Mullenweg on leave in the first place, or any statement from Mark Davies since his Slack account went dark. Until one of those things happens, Automattic's employees are left choosing between a founder's Slack message and a company statement that hasn't been withdrawn.