The Hollow Man

So we’re in the midst of Rosh Hashanah, and I meant to have this time off as a celebration of the new year and, unfortunately, recover from the bug I caught during ElevateCX Denver.

Unfortunately, Matt Mullenweg is once again having a meltdown, so I’m here writing about him instead.¹

Now, my initial understanding of this saga was admittedly shallow. My old professional website still runs on WordPress, but being a mostly-former user has meant that my professional interest leans less toward the workings of the company or its competitors and more toward “Oh, for fuck’s sake, what has Matt Mullenweg done now?”

So last week, when a friend brought up the drama between Mullenweg (CEO of Automattic and, apparently, sole owner of Wordpress.org and dictator in all but name of the WordPress Foundation) and WP Engine (a major WordPress hosting service), I found it interesting but perhaps outside the jurisdiction of this newsletter, given the nature of the things I normally yell about here.

We’ve since gotten many more details about what Mullenweg has actually been up to, and it turns out I was, uh, super wrong about that.

Josh Collinsworth wrote up a fantastic and thorough review of what transpired between Automattic and WP Engine over the past few months with both useful context and commentary,² and honestly, if you have the time, it’s worth pausing here and reading that if you haven’t.

If you’d prefer a summary, though, I’ll do my best. It’s genuinely difficult to figure out where to start, but for the sake of space and time, we’ll start 18 months ago, which is when Mullenweg claims he started trying to work out his concerns about WP Engine’s use of WordPress’s trademark and its contributions (or lack thereof) to the WordPress open source project. 

WP Engine disputes this timeline; they say Automattic reached out only “earlier in 2024,” proposing WP Engine’s involvement in a WooCommerce partner program that also referenced a trademark license, but without making any accusations regarding violations of trademarks.³  

WP Engine claims that “Automattic unilaterally shut down those discussions in August 2024 without an agreement, informing WPE that Automattic was ‘reassessing how we will deal with WP Engine’” and that they received no other communications about the trademarks from Automattic or Mullenweg until mid-September.⁴

From there, things get murky on Mullenweg’s side and less so on WP Engine’s side, at least from my perspective, because we have (as of publishing) lots of receipts from WP Engine and not so many from Mullenweg.

WP Engine alleges that beginning September 17, Automattic and Mullenweg began a campaign of threats essentially amounting to extortion: either WP Engine paid Automattic 8 percent of its gross revenues on a monthly basis as a license to use WordPress trademarks, or Mullenweg would proceed with his “scorched earth nuclear approach to WPE.”⁵

This scorched-earth, nuclear approach started with excoriating WP Engine on stage at WordCamp US on September 20th and has continued since on his blog, on social media, in various interviews, and in a WordPress news post sent to every WP admin in the world. 

Not long after that, Mullenweg banned WP Engine from WordPress.org (not once but twice!), effectively locking out WP Engine and all its customers from maintaining their websites hosted by the company.

What Mullenweg himself has since referred to as a “war" has culminated in WP Engine filing a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg. Automattic followed this by posting its response on WordPress.org’s Twitter account, in which it misidentified WordPress.org as a party to the lawsuit and announced that it had retained noted child slave labor defender Neal Katyal as its representation.⁶

I’m not going to offer an opinion on the merits of the lawsuit WP Engine filed against Automattic and Mullenweg; I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not qualified to comment on that. I have and will continue to reference some of the claims in the lawsuit because they involve Mullenweg’s behavior, but again, anything discussed here is just my personal opinion.

And my personal opinion is that Mullenweg is a giant toddler, and have you ever tried reasoning with a toddler in the midst of a meltdown? It’s impossible, and it just draws more attention from the other moms in the bougie Target you drove across town to because it carried a larger assortment of sandals for your picky 480-month-old.

Mullenweg wants to take his toys (plus 8 percent of WP Engine’s gross profits) and go home, but if his petty whining everywhere on the internet is anything to go by, being a 40-year-old manchild in a CEO trenchcoat with almost half a billion dollars and a victim complex means that no one’s allowed to comment on his tantrums.

Listen, it’s certainly easy and maybe a little funny to sit here and make jokes about Mullenweg’s childish behavior. But obviously, this isn’t just a tantrum. He is – by his own admission⁷ – unleashing weapons of mass destruction on his own community and significantly impacting their livelihoods.

If he were just napalming his life, that would be one thing, but when has someone like Mullenweg ever been satisfied with his own destruction?

As always, it’s the damage done to people that has ultimately brought me back into this story. It’s not that I don’t care about WordPress, but a fight between two for-profit companies competing over trademarks and territory doesn’t interest me.

This is clearly not that. This is a CEO of a company carpet-bombing a community he helped build (and one centered around a product that powers 43 percent of the internet!) for reasons that are not at all clear, all the while personally firing indiscriminately in all directions and seemingly trying to hit as many targets as he can along the way.

So maybe he’s not a giant toddler – maybe he’s just a hollow, stuffed man.

Mullenweg’s speech and behavior these past several weeks are baffling, to say the least. For example, in its lawsuit, WP Engine claims that in late September Mullenweg tried to convince their CEO, Heather Brunner, to leave WP Engine for Automattic:⁹

When a soft touch didn’t work, he allegedly tried to blackmail Brunner into leaving WP Engine by threatening to ruin her reputation with the company and the WordPress community if she didn’t comply:

WP Engine claims that Brunner “never interviewed with or negotiated a job offer with Automattic.”¹⁰ If substantiated, this is a wild, wild thing to contemplate. If it had worked, and Brunner did somehow agree to work for Automattic, how would Mullenweg have explained it? What was his expectation for his working relationship with her?

But surely any rational person would understand that this strategy – if one can even call it that, considering WP Engine is alleging it’s a crime – was a long shot. In which case, what was Mullenweg’s plan to explain these texts? What was his next move?

The mind, it boggles. And the question of strategy and rationality comes up again and again with even a cursory look at Mullenweg’s behavior. 

Around October 1st, after Mullenweg had banned, unbanned, and maybe even banned WP Engine from WordPress.org again (the timeline is a bit hard to follow at this point), rumors started to circulate that Automattic was offering severance packages to employees who didn’t agree with Mullenweg’s actions in regards to WP Engine.¹¹

In response to those rumors, former Automattic Head of Domains Kellie Peterson wrote two pretty standard tweets in the age of Tech layoffs: one giving recruiters a heads up that talented people were probably coming onto the market soon and another offering job transition support to any former coworkers who didn’t already have offers lined up.

Interactions with the tweets are actually pretty minimal; even now, after her Medium post detailing Mullenweg’s DMs has circulated widely, neither tweet has more than a hundred likes, and both tweets have less than 30 retweets combined. 

Which makes Mullenweg’s reaction all the more bizarre for how disproportionate it is: in a series of DMs, Mullenweg asks why Peterson is “attacking [him] and Automattic publicly” when he’s “never been anything but super nice” to her, demands she reveals the source of the severance information, threatens her with legal action, and then – perhaps most bizarrely – claims he welcomes dissenting opinions and that, oh yeah, WP Engine is actually the one “muzzling their employees,” not Automattic.

Peterson rightly notes the irony inherent in Mullenweg saying he welcomes dissent in the same conversation in which he’s acknowledging that Automattic wants dissenting employees to leave, but she makes another point that’s worth zooming into: it also doesn’t make sense considering Mullenweg has been blocking his employees from signing up to Blind.

This might seem like a point out of left field, but here’s why it isn’t: What seems common in a lot of the reactions I’ve seen to Mullenweg’s actions in the past few weeks is how sudden or extreme it feels, but it doesn’t feel sudden or that extreme to me at all. 

I’ve been waiting and watching for going on seven months for something like this, because Mullenweg has Mullenwegged before, and I knew he’d Mullenweg again.

And while I’ve been waiting, I occasionally get wind of things that I don’t write about for various reasons – either because the source can’t go on the record, I can’t verify the thing to a standard that I’m comfortable with, or because it was so isolated as to be of little interest to most people.

Mullenweg blocking access to Blind was one of those things. I’d heard rumblings about it a few months ago, but at the time it seemed like a relatively disconnected thing, and I couldn’t find more than one source to verify it. Well, now I have, and it no longer seems like an isolated thing.

Automattic has an internal anonymous forum called Anonymattic, which has been turned on and off over the years (as of publishing, it is turned on). Some Automatticians trust that it really is anonymous, but given how Mullenweg’s behaved over the years, others didn’t and instead migrated to Blind.

Or, they tried to. Back in July, a screenshot made it onto Tumblr in a now-deleted post (thus no link), allegedly showing Mullenweg admitting that Blind registration/confirmation emails were being forwarded to him:

Sometime later, someone posted on Blind about the blockade, including a screenshot of a conversation on Anonymattic about it:

And now Mullenweg seems to be turning his attention to the ex-Automattician Slack community, allegedly trying to find ways to take it over, ostensibly to control others’ speech there too. (More on that to come, I’m sure, since everything about this drama has been evolving.)

Again, I’m talking about this to show a pattern of behavior. Mullenweg’s abuse of power, his need for control, his paranoia, his oversized sense of importance and victimhood – none of that is new.

Mullenweg has already demonstrated egregious lapses in judgment and abuses of power, it’s just that up until now he’s wielded his power against vulnerable populations without access to high-powered lawyers and their own massive platforms.

It feels new because of the scale at which we’re seeing it right now, but he was like this in July. He was like this in February, when he violated his own company policies, undermined his own Trust & Safety team, argued at length with Tumblr users and a trans woman on Twitter, and then released private user account information on multiple platforms. He was probably like this well before that, even, we just didn’t see a lot of it publicly.

You can draw a straight line from Mullenweg’s shitty behavior in February to his shitty behavior now. I’m not sitting here asking myself, how could this have happened? 

We know how it happened. We all saw it happen in real-time. There’s no mystery here. He fucked around before and never had to find out. Why not fuck around again? We didn’t deal with him when we had the chance, and here we are.

This is what happens when there’s no accountability for powerful people when they test the waters with small abuses of power.¹² It all goes back to Faile’s Razor: Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which is adequately explained by a persistent lack of consequences.¹³ 

Matt Mullenweg is a man in dire need of consequences. Not just on behalf of his company and employees, who, thanks to Mullenweg, have been dealt a trust and reputational blow from which I’m genuinely unsure they can recover. Not just for members of the WordPress community, many of whom have built their livelihoods around what appears to have been an empty promise told purely for Mullenweg’s enrichment.

He desperately needs consequences, because I don’t think he’s capable of voluntarily course-correcting at this point. I know it might be gauche to quote oneself, but back in June, when Mullenweg came back from his sabbatical with nary a mention of the Tumblr fiasco, I asked:

We have our answer. It’s no. It’s just no. He’s incapable of or unwilling to engage in the self-reflection needed to recognize the harm he’s caused or to atone for it, which is ironic because he’s managed to do a lot of this damage at the beginning of the Days of Awe, and if ever there was a time for repentance, it’s now.

But really: Mullenweg needs consequences because he’s not the only toxic Tech CEO who thinks themselves above accountability. This has all happened before, and it will all happen again – unless we finally learn this lesson: accountability matters. 

Assholes will be assholes if we allow it. We should stop allowing it.

If Mullenweg was a warning in February, he needs to be made an example now, and I think (I hope) we’re finally going to see that. There seems to be enough outrage, enough momentum, that either in a court of law or public opinion, Mullenweg’s going to be held accountable for his misbehavior.

Will that accountability be swift and decisive enough to save WordPress? I don’t know. I hope so, but I’m much less knowledgeable in that. What I’ve read from others makes me think there’s not much left of Automattic’s reputation or community goodwill to salvage, but there’s some.

But if Automattic’s Board and investors wait until the courts or law enforcement intervene, salvaging what little remains could well be impossible, and that seems like it would be the end of WordPress.

Not with a bang but a whimper.

UPDATE 05OCT24:

Well, I said there’d be more to come on this, and as Mullenweg seems determined to continue Mullenwegging, here we are.

I mentioned above that ex-Automatticians have a long-standing alum Slack community, which (if you’re reading this from a perspective outside of Tech) is pretty standard practice for employees of Tech companies. I’m a part of a few alum communities, as are most of my friends in the broader Tech space.

These communities are usually (not always, but commonly) independent from the company itself and run by ex-employees because no one wants to party and/or vent in front of their past/potentially future bosses, particularly if the workplace those employees just left was hostile or toxic. Even if it wasn’t, psychological safety for ex-coworkers to speak freely amongst themselves is paramount in communities like these.

So for Mullenweg to decide that 1) he’s entitled to enter a space for which he doesn’t qualify (not only is he not ex-Automattic, his IS Automattic) and wasn’t invited to for very clear reasons, and 2) then refuse to leave after being asked to – well, it’s fucking wild is what it is.

Also, can we just pause here for a moment and admire this absolutely fucking bonkers thing Matt is saying here?

My dude. You are on the record threatening a member of this very Slack community with legal action for offering support to their fellow Automattic alums mere days ago. In what universe do you think anyone in this community is then going to hand you the keys to a transcript of everything any alum has ever said, going back to the beginning of the community?

I don’t know how you can go out of your way to control and block employee speech on completely separate platforms and legally threaten an ex-employee, then go look at the ex-Automattician community and think, “Yes. These people will welcome me.” Amazing. -1000000000000/10. Many notes.

“And so are your confidentiality agreements!” – Matt Mullenweg, probably

UPDATE 05OCT24, like, 20 minutes later

Before I could even finish writing this to post it, there was an update: Mullenweg left the community. Which, good, and also: why. Why do this at all. Is there no one around to advise you? Fucking hell, man.

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1   Is writing about this what I wanted to do today? No, no it is not. Matt, can you please get your shit together so that I can have one goddamned holiday to myself?

2  Aptly summed up in the URL as ‘fire-matt,’ by the way.

3  WPEngine, Inc. v. Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg, No. 3:24-cv-06917 (N.D. Cal. filed 2024), at 34.

4  Id.

5  WPEngine, No. 3:24-cv-06917, at 23.

6  As one does when one is the good guy in a legal action.

7  WPEngine, No. 3:24-cv-06917, at 22.

8  As long as that attempt at a summary seems, believe me when I say it’s, like, the barest outline of what’s happened between Mullenweg and WP Engine. You really should go read Collinsworth’s piece, because there are (as a friend put it) lots of weird little pieces to this story and he lays them all out brilliantly.

9  WPEngine, No. 3:24-cv-06917, at 35.

10  WPEngine, No. 3:24-cv-06917, at 36.

11  As is par for the course by now, Mullenweg’s post announcing that 159 employees took them up on the offer is weirdly cavalier. I’ll also note that paying their employees to leave puts Automattic in the same club as Basecamp – and what a sad, shitty little club it is.

12  Although, actually, I hesitate to call harassing users and releasing private account information across multiple platforms as small — again, holy shit.

13  Is this me trying to subtly say I told you so? No, I’m saying it blatantly: I fucking told you so.