You wake up, check Slack, and find out your company’s co-founder and CEO just got escorted out of the building by the CFO and the board. Except the building is the internet, and the CEO is Matt Mullenweg.
The leaks are already dripping with Succession-level drama. Mullenweg himself took to an Announcement Slack channel to declare that CFO Mark Davies had “conspired” with board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker to force him into a leave of absence. It’s the kind of boardroom betrayal that makes for great television.
It’s easy to grab popcorn and watch the billionaire steward of WordPress throw a tantrum over his sudden ouster. But if you run a business on WordPress, this isn’t a TV show. It’s a structural nightmare. Open source is a beautiful lie we tell ourselves to feel in control.
You probably thought WordPress belonged to the community. That’s the marketing pitch, isn’t it? The reality is that Matt Mullenweg was simultaneously WordPress’s most passionate steward and its single point of failure. Forcing him out might temporarily protect Automattic’s stability, but it violently exposes the fragile, undemocratic reality of the web’s most widely used CMS.
The board didn’t step in to save open source. They stepped in because the perceived risk to the business finally outweighed their loyalty to the founder. The board didn’t protect the internet; they protected the valuation. They aren’t saving the community; they are protecting capital.
And the community? The millions of developers and businesses who actually build on WordPress? They still have no real seat at the table. If the leader of your critical platform can be forced out in a corporate coup, how safe is your stack?
Your entire business is just a guest in someone else’s codebase. It’s time to look at your infrastructure and ask: if this house of cards falls, who is actually holding the keys?
FAQ
Q: Doesn't this just prove the board's checks and balances are working?
A: It proves capital's checks and balances are working. Open source has zero checks and balances if a founder and a board can hold the entire ecosystem hostage without community input.
Q: Should I migrate off WordPress immediately?
A: Not immediately, but you need to ruthlessly audit your stack. If your critical infrastructure depends on the mood of a single CEO or a volatile board, you need an exit strategy today.
Q: Is Mullenweg the victim here?
A: Mullenweg isn't the victim; he built the single point of failure. The real victims are the millions of businesses who bought the open-source myth and are now just hostages to a corporate power struggle.