Automattic's board voted Matt Mullenweg onto paid leave. He still controls WordPress.org.

Automattic’s board voted on September 9 to put founder Matt Mullenweg on paid leave. CFO Mark Davies is now interim CEO. Mullenweg keeps his board seat and personal control of WordPress.org, which the board has no authority over.

Two things share a name here and don’t share an owner. Automattic is a company with a board, outside investors and about 1,500 employees after its April 2025 layoffs. The board used the power that comes with all three. WordPress.org is a domain, a plugin and theme directory, and the update servers every self-hosted WordPress site checks for new code. Mullenweg runs that personally. W3Techs puts WordPress on 40.3% of all websites and 58.8% of every site whose CMS it can identify. Who holds those keys reaches well past one company’s org chart.

What we know

Mullenweg broke the news himself, in a Slack channel visible to every Automattic employee. “I won’t be able to make the [meeting] tomorrow. @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,” he wrote, per the message Julie Bort and Sarah Perez published at TechCrunch. He signed off: “I voted against that. Wishing Mark and all of you the very best.”

The procedure is what he objected to hardest. “I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied,” he wrote in the same channel.

Automattic’s own statement runs two sentences. “Matt Mullenweg is currently on leave from Automattic. Mark Davies, Automattic’s CFO, will lead the company as interim CEO,” the company told TechCrunch. Davies keeps his board seat. So does Mullenweg. Toni Schneider, one of the directors Mullenweg named, ran Automattic as CEO from 2006 to 2014.

Then the line that matters outside the building. Mary Hubbard, executive director of the WordPress project, told the community that “Matt remains the leader of the WordPress project and I remain Executive Director of WordPress. Our teams, priorities, and work continue as planned,” per TechCrunch’s reporting.

What we don’t know

Why. Nobody has given a reason. TechCrunch says plainly that it isn’t clear why the board moved now, and neither Automattic nor the four directors have filled that in.

How long. “Leave of absence” carries no stated end date, and nothing published so far says what would bring Mullenweg back to the CEO job.

What happens to WordPress.org if he never comes back. The board can appoint an interim CEO, hire a permanent one and reshape Automattic around whoever that is. It has no vote at all over the domain or the directory. Most open projects this size answer to something outside themselves. Servo sits under Linux Foundation Europe. Five Rust teams ratified a written policy on LLM-generated patches in August. The rules are published and anyone can read them. WordPress.org has no published charter, no appeal route and no body that can overrule its leader. That was already true on September 8. It’s just harder to look away from now.

The WP Engine litigation is also still live. WP Engine sued in October 2024 after Mullenweg cut off its access to WordPress.org. Automattic countersued in October 2025. None of the coverage connects that case to this week’s vote.

Bort and Perez had the Slack message and the company statement first, at TechCrunch. Roger Montti covered it for Search Engine Journal. 404 Media and The Repository ran it the same day. On r/Wordpress, where the story drew roughly 250 upvotes and more than 120 comments inside a day, one commenter put the split more bluntly: “‘On leave’ from the Cathedral, still self-appointed dictator of the Bazaar.”

What this means for you

Your update path didn’t change this week. Core, plugin and theme updates still come from WordPress.org, and the person deciding what sits in that directory still decides alone. Hubbard says the work continues as planned. There’s no evidence yet to doubt her.

Keep October 2024 in mind as the precedent. WordPress.org took over WP Engine’s Advanced Custom Fields listing and pushed a fork called Secure Custom Fields to every site on that plugin’s auto-update path. Mullenweg invoked point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines and it was done. The practical response now is an inventory. Write down which of your plugins are maintained by companies currently fighting with Mullenweg, check which of those you auto-update, and know where you’d get the code if a listing changed hands overnight. It’s the same discipline a single distro maintainer’s root bug asks of you, applied to a directory that feeds 40% of the web.