Inside the Automattic Boardroom Coup: The 33-Hour Battle for WordPress
On September 9, 2026, the six-member board of Automattic — the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Jetpack — voted to put its own CEO and co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, on paid leave. Thirty-three hours later, Mullenweg was back in control, and the directors who had tried to sideline him were gone, along with the company’s CFO and its chief legal officer. Reported by DNYUZ on October 19, 2026 in the piece “Inside the 33-hour failed boardroom coup to overthrow WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg” — based on Fortune’s reporting, including interviews with former Automattic employees and court filings — the Automattic boardroom coup is one of the strangest corporate power struggles ever seen inside an open-source ecosystem.
The Automattic boardroom coup seemingly came out of the blue. Mullenweg had just returned from his annual Burning Man trip, and the board was largely made up of directors who had mentored him for years. He broke the news to staff himself in a Slack message that read, in part: “@Mark Davies has conspired with @Ann Dunwoody, @Toni, and @Sue Decker behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.”
Before the Automattic boardroom coup began, nobody outside the boardroom had any warning that a leadership earthquake was about to hit the company steering one of the most important pieces of software on the internet. WordPress powers more than 40% of the web, and millions of business owners, agencies, and freelancers in the United States depend on its ecosystem every day. This article breaks down exactly what happened during those 33 hours, who was involved, why it may have happened, and — most importantly — what it means for you if your business runs on WordPress.
What Happened: The 33-Hour Automattic boardroom coup
The story starts on September 9, 2026, when a special committee of three directors — Toni Schneider, Sue Decker, and Ann Dunwoody — voted to put Mullenweg on leave and named Mark Davies, the company’s chief financial officer, as interim CEO. When the Automattic boardroom coup was set in motion, the board had just six members, and the vote to suspend Mullenweg succeeded despite the fact that he owns roughly 84% of Automattic’s voting power, a figure he has stated himself.
The cast of characters behind the Automattic boardroom coup reads like a study in Silicon Valley history. Mark Davies was the CFO who was named interim CEO. Ann Dunwoody, a retired four-star Army general, joined the board in 2018 as its first new member in 13 years. Toni Schneider quit Yahoo in 2006 to run Automattic alongside Mullenweg and served as CEO for eight years. Sue Decker is a former Yahoo president. These were not hostile outsiders; they were, in many cases, the people who had mentored Mullenweg for years. That is one reason the Automattic boardroom coup stunned everyone who watches the WordPress world.
There is a structural reality that made the Automattic boardroom coup look doomed from the start. Because Mullenweg controls about 84% of the voting power, the board’s move had, in a former employee’s words quoted by Fortune, “no mathematical way” to succeed — a “suicide mission.” Perhaps it was never about the math, the former employee suggested; perhaps it was more of a message. Whatever the intent, Mullenweg undid the move with astonishing speed, and nobody — not even the directors — has publicly explained what they hoped to achieve.
During the 33 hours of the Automattic boardroom coup, events moved fast behind closed doors. Per TechCrunch, Davies and chief legal officer Andy Missan signed each other’s severance agreements worth about $8.15 million combined. Meanwhile, Mullenweg took to X seeking “great sysadmin and security researchers to hire really quick, no one from @automattic!” He also posted that he “fully support[ed]” Davies as interim CEO — support that proved remarkably short-lived.
On his return, Mullenweg wrote to staff: “(Don’t call it a comeback…) Howdy everybody!” alongside a link to LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out.” When the dust of the Automattic boardroom coup settled, the outcome was total: by September 12, Schneider and Decker had resigned, Dunwoody had been removed, and Davies and Missan had been fired. Two weeks later, Mullenweg named a new board including science-fiction author Hugh Howey — author of the books the Silo TV series is based on — author Andy Chan, and social-app IRL co-founders Krutal Desai and Henry Khachatryan.
Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Automattic boardroom coup is what was never said. None of the board members have publicly explained why they moved against him, and Mullenweg has declined to describe why he was all but fired or how he regained control. Even some investors were left guessing: a person familiar with BlackRock’s investment told Fortune they learned of the move from news reports and didn’t understand how Mullenweg undid it. For the founders and operators of WordPress-based businesses, that silence is the most unsettling part of the whole episode — and it is the reason why the Automattic boardroom coup deserves your attention even though your own site kept running the whole time.
Who Is Affected by the Automattic boardroom coup
Let’s start with the reassuring part: the Automattic boardroom coup was never a threat to WordPress.org itself, the free open-source software your website probably runs on. WordPress is released under the GPL license and is maintained by a global community of contributors; it does not depend on any single company, board vote, or CEO. Your site’s dashboard, plugins, and theme kept working through all 33 hours of the drama, and they will keep working regardless of who sits in Automattic’s boardroom. That structural independence is one of the proven strengths of open-source software, and it is worth remembering whenever corporate headlines create panic.
That said, the Automattic boardroom coup does matter for a large slice of the ecosystem. Automattic owns WordPress.com (the commercial hosted platform), WooCommerce (the e-commerce engine behind a huge share of American online stores), and Jetpack (the security and performance plugin installed on millions of sites). If you run a WooCommerce store, use Jetpack for security and backups, or host a site on WordPress.com, you are downstream of Automattic’s leadership — and leadership earthquakes at a company that stewards your tooling are worth watching closely. The Automattic boardroom coup is a reminder that even mature, deeply entrenched platforms can experience sudden governance shocks.
For agencies, the Automattic boardroom coup is a reminder that client work built on the WordPress ecosystem deserves professional stewardship. Businesses that rely on professional WordPress development and ongoing care have someone watching the platform on their behalf — someone who can separate corporate theater from genuine technical risk. WooCommerce store owners watched the Automattic boardroom coup unfold knowing that any disruption to the commercial arm of the ecosystem could eventually touch payments, shipping integrations, and the extension marketplace. None of that disruption materialized this time, but the episode put the “what if” scenario on the table for every operator paying attention.
Context helps here. Mullenweg created WordPress with Mike Little in 2003 and founded Automattic in 2005 (deliberately misspelling the name to include his first name). The company acquired Tumblr in 2019 for $3 million, raised $288 million in 2021 at a valuation of about $7.5 billion, and has raised close to $1 billion in total. This is not a fragile startup; it is a giant. And yet the Automattic boardroom coup showed that even a giant with a founder holding 84% of the voting power can become a battleground. If your revenue depends on this platform, that is a fact you should file away — not with fear, but with a plan.
Why It Matters
To understand why the Automattic boardroom coup happened, you have to understand the war that has been consuming Mullenweg for two years: his fight with WP Engine. WP Engine, majority-owned by private-equity firm Silver Lake, sells WordPress hosting. In 2024, Mullenweg decided WP Engine wasn’t contributing enough back to the open-source project: Automattic donated roughly 3,900 hours per week to WordPress development, while WP Engine contributed about 40. He called WP Engine a “cancer” on WordPress, accused it of switching off a revision-history feature as a cost-cutting measure, demanded a cut of its revenue for use of the WordPress trademark (the first offer, per court filings, was $5 million per year), and cut the company off from key resources.
WP Engine sued Automattic and Mullenweg in federal court in Northern California in October 2024, accusing them of attempted extortion, libel, and interfering with the business — later adding antitrust claims that a federal judge revived on September 24, 2026. If WP Engine wins, federal antitrust law could let it collect three times its damages. Automattic countersued a year later for trademark infringement, and WP Engine asked the judge to throw out those claims as punishment for alleged bad-faith conduct during discovery. By the time the Automattic boardroom coup played out, this litigation had become the most consequential fight in the WordPress ecosystem — and Fortune’s reporting ties the coup directly to its fallout.
The Automattic boardroom coup may have had a more immediate trigger: evidence preservation. Court filings show WP Engine believes Automattic’s preservation obligation began in July 2024, yet after more than a year of evidence exchange, Automattic had turned over just 16 of Mullenweg’s Telegram messages, one Signal conversation, and no WhatsApp messages. Mullenweg lost a phone while traveling, can’t locate a laptop, and his phone wasn’t fully copied until around March 2026. In September 2024, he had even urged people on X to contact him using “Signal with disappearing messages.” At an October 7, 2026 hearing, Magistrate Judge Ajay Krishnan said he was leaning toward denying WP Engine’s request to throw out Automattic’s claims — but he also said Automattic’s former lawyers had exaggerated their preservation efforts, pointing to a 2025 letter claiming “all reasonable steps” when Mullenweg’s phone wasn’t imaged until two weeks after that letter. “It was false,” WP Engine’s lawyer Yury Kapgan replied.
There is one more telling detail: Davies had told a WP Engine board member in 2024 that Automattic would “go to war” to defend its trademark — and then Davies became the interim CEO during the coup. It is impossible to know exactly what alarmed the directors enough to attempt the Automattic boardroom coup, but the collision of a bet-the-company lawsuit, messy discovery, and an increasingly personal war with a Silver Lake-backed rival is the backdrop Fortune lays out.
The toll inside the company has been real. In October 2024, Mullenweg offered staff who disagreed with his approach $30,000 or six months’ salary — whichever was higher — to leave. The so-called “alignment offer” was taken by 159 people, roughly 8.4% of the company, according to Mullenweg’s own blog. Former employees are split on the whole saga: some say the public fight with WP Engine hurt the company, while ex-WooCommerce engineering lead Naman Malhotra, who left in 2025, said Mullenweg “did the right thing” by confronting WP Engine. The Automattic boardroom coup arrived on top of two years of exactly this kind of internal division, and it is fair to read the board’s failed move as the latest symptom of a company under extraordinary strain.
What to Do Now
The Automattic boardroom coup doesn’t change any of the fundamentals of running a healthy WordPress site — but it is a useful wake-up call. Here are the practical steps every site owner should take, numbered for clarity:
1. Don’t panic about WordPress itself. The open-source project is independent of Automattic’s corporate drama. Your site’s core software, your plugins, and your theme are not going to vanish because of a boardroom fight. Reacting to headlines by making rash moves — like hastily migrating a store to an unfamiliar platform — is far riskier than staying the course.
2. Watch the WP Engine litigation, not just the headlines. The coup was the drama, but the lawsuit is the story with real ecosystem consequences. Treble-damages exposure and trademark rulings could reshape how hosting companies interact with the WordPress project. If you want to stay ahead of platform-level changes, check out our coverage of the WordPress 7.2 beta 1 roadmap alongside legal developments — platform awareness is part of good site ownership.
3. Keep your site updated and backed up regardless of corporate drama. If the Automattic boardroom coup teaches anything, it is that even the biggest companies have governance risk — and the best defense is a site that doesn’t depend on anyone’s goodwill. Run core, theme, and plugin updates on a disciplined schedule, and keep tested off-site backups. This is the core of professional website maintenance services, and it protects you against everything from zero-day vulnerabilities to upstream ecosystem shifts.
4. Consider a professional care plan if WordPress runs your business. Stores, membership sites, and lead-generation websites are revenue infrastructure, and they deserve proactive monitoring, security hardening, and a human who can respond when something breaks. Our WordPress care plans are built exactly for that — so a 33-hour corporate earthquake, or a 3 a.m. plugin conflict, never becomes your emergency.
5. Diversify your ecosystem risk. Don’t concentrate every dependency in one vendor. Know your hosting alternatives, keep export-ready copies of your content and order data, and document your recovery process. If you host with a provider entangled in the legal fights that shadowed the Automattic boardroom coup, at least have an exit plan you have actually tested.
6. Get an independent read on your site’s health. Moments like the Automattic boardroom coup are a good reminder to make sure your own house is in order: security headers, update status, SEO basics, and performance. A free website SEO audit gives you a baseline that has nothing to do with who sits on any board — just the facts about your site.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly was the Automattic boardroom coup?
The Automattic boardroom coup refers to the September 9, 2026 vote by a special committee of three Automattic directors — Toni Schneider, Sue Decker, and Ann Dunwoody — to put CEO and co-founder Matt Mullenweg on paid leave, naming CFO Mark Davies as interim CEO. Thirty-three hours later, Mullenweg had regained control; by September 12, Schneider and Decker had resigned, Dunwoody had been removed, and Davies and the chief legal officer had been fired. The story was reported by DNYUZ on October 19, 2026, drawing on Fortune’s reporting, which included interviews with former employees and court filings.
Who won the fight — Mullenweg or the board?
Mullenweg won, decisively. He has said he owns about 84% of Automattic’s voting power, which meant the board’s move had, in a former employee’s words, “no mathematical way” to succeed. The directors who attempted the removal are all gone, replaced by a new board including author Hugh Howey, author Andy Chan, and IRL co-founders Krutal Desai and Henry Khachatryan. Nobody on either side has publicly explained the full story behind why the Automattic boardroom coup was attempted or exactly how it was reversed.
Why did the board try to remove Mullenweg?
Nobody has publicly explained the Automattic boardroom coup’s motive. None of the directors involved have given a public account, and Mullenweg has declined to describe why he was all but fired or how he regained control. Fortune’s reporting ties the episode to Mullenweg’s escalating war with WP Engine — a lawsuit involving antitrust claims revived in September 2026, plus apparent evidence-preservation problems on Automattic’s side — but the precise trigger remains unconfirmed. Even investors were caught off guard: a person familiar with BlackRock’s investment said they learned of the move from news reports.
Could the Automattic boardroom coup affect my WordPress site?
In the short term, no. WordPress.org is open-source software maintained by a global community; your site’s core, themes, and plugins do not depend on Automattic’s leadership. Over the longer term, businesses built on WooCommerce, Jetpack, or WordPress.com should stay alert, because the underlying conflict — the WP Engine litigation and the strain inside Automattic — is still unresolved. The safest posture is practical: keep your site updated, keep tested backups, and work with professionals who monitor the platform for you. Read the full original report on the attempted ouster at DNYUZ for the complete timeline.
Conclusion
The Automattic boardroom coup lasted only 33 hours, but it exposed fault lines that two years of corporate warfare had carved into the WordPress ecosystem. A board of longtime mentors voted out a founder who controls 84% of the votes; within days, every participant in the plot was gone. The underlying fight with WP Engine — with its antitrust claims, trademark battles, and evidence-preservation controversies — grinds on in federal court, and its outcome could reshape the commercial landscape around WordPress for years.
For site owners, the takeaway is simple: you cannot control boardrooms, but you can control your own website. Keep it updated, keep it backed up, and keep professionals watching it. If WordPress powers your business and you want that handled by people who live in this ecosystem every day, take a look at our WordPress care plans — because the next 33-hour surprise shouldn’t be your emergency.
