Automattic Inc. told its staff on Friday that it has a new board of directors. There are four names on it — the novelist Hugh Howey, the author Amy Chan, and Henry Khachatryan and Krutal Desai, who together founded the social app IRL. None of them was a director three weeks ago. Three new advisers were named alongside them: Jaime Waydo, formerly chief technology officer at Whoop; Matt Van Horn, a co-founder of June; and Hiten Shah, a co-founder of KISSmetrics.
The directors they replace left in the space of a fortnight. Toni Schneider, Automattic's founding chief executive and now chief executive of Bluesky, resigned. Sue Decker resigned. General Ann Dunwoody was removed. Mark Davies, the chief financial officer, and Andy Missan, the chief legal officer, were terminated.
What connects the two lists is a meeting on Wednesday 9 September, at which the first group formed a special committee and voted to place Matt Mullenweg, the founder and chief executive, on a paid leave of absence, with Davies to serve as interim chief executive. Automattic's statement at the time was brief and supportive of the arrangement: Davies "will lead the company as interim CEO. The Board has full confidence in Mark's leadership."
By the company's own accounting, that arrangement lasted 33 hours and 20 minutes.
What is documented, and what is not
A good deal about this episode is on the record. A good deal is not, and the distinction matters, because the participants are named individuals and the dispute is live.
On the record: the date of the meeting, the four directors who voted for the resolution, Mullenweg's vote against it, his retention of his board seat, Davies's appointment as interim chief executive, Automattic's confirmation on 12 September that Mullenweg is "chairman and CEO of Automattic, with full support of the board," the 33-hour-and-20-minute figure, and the five departures.
Also on the record, because Mullenweg put it there himself, is his account. He says he received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting convened and "requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied." He told staff the board acted "without advance warning and without giving me a meaningful opportunity to understand or respond to their concerns before they acted," that he "took the steps necessary to reverse that action," and that he is "back and fully in charge of the company." On X he called it a "coup attempt." Later, more cheerfully: "We had the most interesting board meeting in a decade (since the Woo acquisition)."
Not on the record: why. Neither Automattic nor any of the four directors has published a statement of the concerns that produced the resolution. That is the central missing fact in this story and it should be read as missing rather than as absent. A special committee formed by a majority of a board, acting against a founder-chief executive, is an unusual instrument, and boards that reach for it normally believe they have a reason. None of the four has given one publicly. None has commented.
Also not on the record: the mechanism. Mullenweg says he reversed the action; neither he nor the company has described the corporate machinery by which he did so — a written consent, a removal of directors by stockholder action, or something else. The fact of the reversal is documented. The paperwork is not.
Automattic is a private company. It files no proxy statement, no 8-K, no list of directors. Its corporate blog and press page carried nothing about any of this when checked on Saturday morning; the announcement of the new board was made internally and reached the public through TechCrunch. There is no governance document to consult.
The number that decided it
There is, however, a number, and Mullenweg supplied it himself. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in October 2024, he said he controls 84 per cent of Automattic's voting power.
That figure explains the shape of September more completely than any account of the meeting does. A board holding four of five seats and 16 per cent of the votes is not a check on management. It is an advisory body that can be reconstituted by the person it is advising. The events of 9 to 12 September did not change Automattic's control structure; they demonstrated it, at a cost of five directors and officers and 33 hours and 20 minutes.
Mullenweg's own summary of his position afterwards was unadorned: "for purposes of Delaware law, I am the CEO, President, Treasurer, and Secretary." Four offices, one person, one stockholder with a supermajority of the votes. Delaware law will accommodate that arrangement indefinitely.
His message to staff also carried a strategic frame: "We are living through times of unprecedented change, possibly a singularity. The next six months will determine the next 20 years of Automattic." Whatever the four directors' concerns were, that sentence is a reasonable proxy for the atmosphere in which they arose.
The new directors
Two of the four warrant a note. Khachatryan and Desai co-founded IRL, a social app backed by SoftBank that shut down in June 2023 after an internal investigation found that a large share of its claimed users were bots. SoftBank sued the company in August 2023 alleging fake user numbers. A separate suit between the founders was allowed to proceed by the Delaware Court of Chancery in March 2025.
Howey, who wrote the Silo novels, has known Mullenweg since at least 2018, when the two walked part of the Camino de Santiago together. Chan wrote Breakup Bootcamp. Neither has a public record in software governance.
It is fair to say that this is not a board assembled for the purpose of supervising a chief executive, and it would be strange to pretend otherwise. It is also fair to say that the previous board's attempt to do exactly that is what produced this one.
Why a private company's board matters here
Automattic is not an ordinary private company, because of what sits on the other side of it.
WordPress, the open-source project, runs 40.2 per cent of all websites and 58.7 per cent of those using a content management system the surveyors can identify, according to W3Techs data surveyed on 26 September. The WordPress Foundation, a 501(c)(3) founded by Mullenweg, "owns and oversees the trademarks for the names and logos of WordPress." Its trademark policy directs anyone wanting to use the WordPress mark commercially to a single destination: "please contact Automattic, they have the exclusive license."
So the chain runs: a non-profit founded by Mullenweg owns the mark; Automattic holds the exclusive commercial licence to it; Mullenweg holds 84 per cent of Automattic's votes and, since this month, appoints its directors. There is no point along that chain at which an independent body has a vote that binds him.
That chain matters because open-source software is procured on assumptions about its governance that almost nobody tests. It has already been litigated once. Automattic's dispute with the hosting company WP Engine, running since 2024, turns on precisely the question of who may use the WordPress and WooCommerce marks and on what terms; in July, WP Engine accused Mullenweg in a court filing of destroying evidence, an allegation that has not been adjudicated. The same period saw a 2024 ultimatum to staff after which 159 employees took severance, deactivations of contributor accounts on WordPress.org, and a 16 per cent workforce reduction in April 2025.
None of that is new this week. What is new is that the one institution inside the structure capable of producing friction has been replaced with one that is not.
What to watch
For the open-source project, the relevant questions are narrow and answerable. Does the Foundation's board change? Does the trademark policy change? Does the exclusive commercial licence to Automattic change in scope or term? Those are documents, and documents can be read.
For Automattic's outside investors — the company is venture-backed and has never listed — the relevant question is whether anything in September altered the rights attached to their shares. Nothing published suggests it did.
For everyone else, the useful correction is to stop reading the word "board" as though it meant the same thing at every company. At a widely held public company it means a body with the power to fire the chief executive. At Automattic, on the evidence of this month, it means a body the chief executive can fire. Both are legal. Only one of them is a governance control, and it is worth knowing which one is attached to software running two-fifths of the web.
The sequence of events, the composition of the special committee, the new directors and advisers, and the quotations from Mullenweg's internal messages and his posts on X are as reported by TechCrunch: "Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence" (9 September 2026), "Automattic confirms Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted ouster by board" (12 September 2026) and "Automattic has a new board after failed attempt to put CEO on leave" by Sarah Perez, published 4:04pm PDT on 25 September 2026. The 84 per cent voting figure is Mullenweg's own, given at TechCrunch Disrupt in October 2024. Automattic's corporate blog at automattic.com/blog and its press page at automattic.com/press carried no post on the board changes when checked on 26 September 2026; the company is private and files no proxy statement. Trademark ownership and the commercial licence are quoted from the WordPress Foundation's trademark policy at wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy, and the Foundation's purpose and status from wordpressfoundation.org. Usage share is from W3Techs, surveyed 26 September 2026. The IRL shutdown, the SoftBank suit and the March 2025 Delaware Chancery ruling are as reported by TechCrunch, CNBC and Delaware Business Litigation Report respectively, as linked in the 25 September TechCrunch account. The evidence-destruction allegation is WP Engine's, filed in WPEngine, Inc. v. Automattic, Inc. and available on CourtListener; it is an allegation and has not been adjudicated.
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