On September 9, 2026, the board of directors at Automattic — the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, and the single largest contributor to the WordPress open source project — voted to put co-founder Matt Mullenweg on paid leave. He got fifty minutes' notice. His request for a delay to have an attorney review the decision was denied. CFO Mark Davies was installed as interim CEO.

Four days later, Mullenweg was back in charge with the board's "full support."

If you run a WordPress site and you are wondering whether any of this matters to you, the short answer is: not today, but pay attention. Here is what happened, why it happened, and what to watch.

The timeline

The sequence of events moves fast, so here is the condensed version.

September 9: Automattic's board removes Mullenweg as CEO and issues a formal, corporate-toned three-sentence statement: Mullenweg is on leave, Mark Davies is interim CEO, the board has full confidence in the new leadership.

September 11: Mullenweg posts in the company Slack — which Automattic had not removed him from — claiming he is back in control. He removes other admins from the workspace. TechCrunch reports the story with a headline that includes a question mark and the word "trolls?" because at that point nobody outside Automattic could tell whether he had actually regained control of the company or just the Slack channel.

September 12: Automattic issues a second statement. This one reads completely different from the first. It is a single run-on sentence with an informal tone: "Matt Mullenweg is the chairman and CEO of Automattic, with full support of the board and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well." The statement invites the reader to verify the claim on social media rather than simply asserting it. Roger Montti at Search Engine Journal noted that the two statements read as if they were written by different people. It is hard to disagree.

September 12–13: A wave of Automattic employees post supportive messages on social media, which Mullenweg reposts. WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard tweets that she is "relieved and pleased" to see Mullenweg back. Outside the company, the reaction is more skeptical.

Why the board tried to remove him

The official reason has never been stated publicly. But the context is hard to ignore.

Mullenweg has been at the center of a prolonged and messy dispute with WP Engine, one of the largest WordPress hosting companies. What started as a public disagreement about WP Engine's contributions to the WordPress project escalated into a lawsuit, a motion for sanctions, and allegations that Mullenweg destroyed or failed to preserve evidence. Court filings revealed that a laptop and phone that may have contained relevant communications were unaccounted for. Mullenweg himself tweeted about the missing evidence issue on the same day he was ousted, writing that he had discussed it "UNDER OATH AND PENALTY OF PERJURY."

He also tweeted that he needed to hire "sysadmin and security researchers" quickly, "no one from @automattic," and that he wanted to move "some of my stuff currently hosted there, elsewhere." For a sitting CEO to publicly announce he is moving his personal data off company servers is unusual, to put it gently.

The WP Engine dispute has had real consequences beyond the courtroom. WordPress's market share has been declining. WordCamp attendance has been dropping. Plugin developers are reporting shrinking paid user bases, partly because AI tools are making it easier to build what plugins used to do. None of these trends are entirely Mullenweg's fault, but the WP Engine fight accelerated them.

What this means for your WordPress site

If you run WordPress on your own server or through a hosting provider that is not Automattic, the direct impact of this leadership drama is close to zero. WordPress is open source software. It does not stop working because the CEO of one company — even the most important company in the ecosystem — is having a bad week.

But there are two things worth watching.

First, the security initiative. On August 28, before the ouster, WordPress announced a new Core Security Initiative. The program has three goals: faster and more reliable security releases, clearing the backlog of known vulnerabilities, and using AI to proactively find and fix security holes before attackers do. This is genuinely good news. The timing is awkward — a major security push announced days before the company's leadership imploded — but the work itself is important and should continue regardless of who is CEO.

Second, the ecosystem health. Automattic is not just a company that uses WordPress. It is the single largest source of funded contributors to the project. If the leadership chaos causes Automattic to pull back on its contributions, or if key people leave, the pace of WordPress development will slow. You will not notice this tomorrow. You will notice it in six months when a feature you expected slips, or when a security patch takes a week longer than it should.

The question nobody is answering

The most uncomfortable question in all of this is about governance. WordPress is open source, but it is not governed like most open source projects. Mullenweg is the co-founder, the project lead, and the CEO of the company that funds most of the work. When the board tried to remove him, he took back the Slack workspace and reclaimed his position in four days. That is not how corporate governance is supposed to work. It is also not how open source governance is supposed to work.

For site owners, the practical takeaway is this: WordPress is not going away. It powers more than 40% of the web, and that installed base does not disappear because of a boardroom fight. But the drama is a reminder that a single company and a single person have outsized influence over the platform you depend on. If that makes you uncomfortable, the best thing you can do is make sure you are not locked into Automattic's ecosystem more than you need to be. Use WordPress on your own hosting. Keep your plugins minimal and well-maintained. Have a backup plan that does not depend on Jetpack or WordPress.com.

And keep an eye on what happens next. Because this is not over. The WP Engine lawsuit is still active. The sanctions motion is still pending. And a board that tried to remove its CEO and failed in four days is not a board that has resolved its concerns. Something else will happen. When it does, you will want to know whether it affects the software your business runs on.

Sources: Matt Mullenweg Apparently Back In Charge At Automattic and WordPress Co-Founder Matt Mullenweg Ousted As CEO Of Automattic — Search Engine Journal, September 9–13, 2026. WordPress Core Security Initiative — WordPress.org, August 28, 2026.