On September 9, 2026, the Automattic board of directors voted to remove Matt Mullenweg as CEO and place him on paid leave. He was given fifty minutes' notice. His request for time to have an attorney review the decision was denied. The company's CFO, Mark Davies, stepped in as interim CEO.

By Saturday, September 12, Mullenweg was back in charge with the board's "full support." The whole thing lasted roughly seventy-two hours.

If you run a WordPress site and you're wondering whether any of this matters to you, the answer is yes — though probably not for the reason the Twitter drama suggests.

What actually happened

The sequence of events paints a picture of a company in chaos. On Wednesday, the board issued a formal, corporate-toned statement announcing Mullenweg's departure and Davies's appointment. Standard executive transition language.

Then things got weird. Automattic apparently failed to revoke Mullenweg's access to the company Slack workspace. He took control of it, removed administrators, and started posting that he was back in charge. TechCrunch's headline captured the ambiguity perfectly: "Matt Mullenweg tells (trolls?) Automattic staff, saying he's back in control after CEO ouster."

Mary Hubbard, the Executive Director of WordPress, tweeted her support for Mullenweg's return. Automattic employees followed, posting their own endorsements on social media, which Mullenweg amplified by reposting each one.

Then came Saturday's official statement, which read nothing like the first one: "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 tone shift between the two statements is hard to ignore. The first was corporate boilerplate. The second reads like it was written by — or at least heavily influenced by — Mullenweg himself.

The context nobody should forget

This did not happen in a vacuum. Mullenweg's self-described "nuclear" war against WP Engine, which escalated through 2024 and 2025, resulted in a lawsuit that is still active. WP Engine's motion for sanctions accuses Mullenweg of destroying or failing to preserve evidence. Automattic's own e-discovery vendor reported that Mullenweg's laptop and phone were unaccounted for.

The fallout from that fight has been measurable. WordPress's CMS marketshare has been declining. WordCamp attendance is down. The plugin ecosystem is in a slow-motion contraction, with developers seeing their paid user bases shrink as AI tools eat into the use cases that once required third-party plugins.

None of that reverses because Mullenweg is back at his desk.

Why this matters if you run WordPress

The WordPress project and Automattic are not the same thing, but they are deeply entangled. Automattic is the single largest financial contributor to WordPress core development. When the company is consumed by internal power struggles, executive churn, and litigation, the downstream effects are real.

First, development velocity. WordPress core has been moving slowly for years. The block editor, full-site editing, and the admin redesign have all shipped behind schedule. Internal instability at the company that funds a huge chunk of that work does not speed things up.

Second, trust. The WP Engine fight already fractured the WordPress community. Hosting companies, plugin developers, and agencies have been quietly evaluating alternatives — not because WordPress the software stopped working, but because the ecosystem's leadership has become unpredictable. A seventy-two-hour CEO ouster and reversal does not rebuild that confidence.

Third, the talent question. Automattic went through significant layoffs and voluntary departures during the WP Engine conflict. The employees who stayed are now watching their CEO get fired and rehired in the same work week. Retention becomes harder when the ground keeps shifting.

What to actually do about it

If you are running WordPress for your business, you do not need to panic-migrate to something else. WordPress the software is not going to stop working. The plugin and theme ecosystem is vast. Hosting providers will continue supporting it.

But you should be paying attention to the pace of core updates, the health of the plugins you depend on, and whether your hosting provider is investing in WordPress or quietly diversifying. The next twelve months will tell whether Automattic can stabilize enough to be a reliable steward of the project, or whether WordPress's future starts looking more like a community-run effort without a dominant corporate backer.

Either way, the days of treating WordPress as the safe, boring default are over. It is still a good tool. It is just no longer a simple bet.

Sources: Search Engine Journal — Mullenweg Back In Charge, Search Engine Journal — Mullenweg Ousted, TechCrunch via Search Engine Journal