Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.
In the world of AI I imagine that Automattic’s core business model is in turmoil.
Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy? I think we've seen over an over again which one works and which one doesn't.
Have you asked people in China about this?
Where'd you get the idea?
Now go look at the 5 year plan from Beijing. Green technology, robotics, mature node chips, and AI are the focuses.
In other words, it isn’t a mistake that China dominates in the industries that it does.
There’s a whole bureaucracy just to coordinate the implementation at the sector, provincial, and corporate level driven by the State Council, NDRC, and NPC. Governments at all levels are involved with coming up with their own implementation plans to execute on the Five Year Plan.
You can trace decades of Chinese industrial development to those plans but the Chinese system is very different from the Soviet central planning mechanism, which is why I think you’re misinterpreting Alibaba’s price competition. The CCP explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like Alibaba and the manufacturers on it to compete; that’s their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the five year plan instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but it’s very much there.
None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.
Then the soviet system stagnated hard under Brezhnev while the Chinese pivoted under Deng. But those first gains definitely happened under full communism and no capitalist economy has modernized faster.
The word you're looking for is "collapse". It's when something is stable at one point in time, but then later breaks down. That's what "changed". It wasn't random like weather or something. The economic systems collapsed.
> None of this is settled
The fact that it has happened numerous times in different parts of the world makes it pretty settled in my mind.
Not at all. Market vs planned economy is about how the economy is set up. Are there businesses that offer products that you can choose between? That's a market economy. You can have that with democratic governance of corporations. The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy.
You don't need ownership by idiot dictators with money to have a market.
How? Will you also advocate to killing a bunch of people to get from now to the state where workers own the means of production like Trotsky and friends?
Ianal but I don't think the laws care about governing structure of corps. You can start a new corp and run it democratically all you want. There are co-ops and other interesting structures out there
Co-ops can have more democratic voting arrangements, and usually have "one shareholder one vote" principles, though other options are available, and you can mess around with how many votes each shareholder gets.
Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy.
If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.
I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
This is just wrong. As kmeisthax mentioned, shares can have different voting weights - if any at all. Many shareholders have no voting power.
> I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
Did you actually employ them, or did you buy a specific service?
The same phenomenon is happening with "Opt-In by Default". This is newspeak.
Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.
From kmeisthax? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683985
I'm not asserting this definition. I'm arguing against the attempt at newspeak. If one share doesn't imply one vote (because there are different classes etc.), what is wrong with pointing out the obvious contradiction in "One share, one vote"?
> Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.
I disagree that the US was a democracy while voting was restricted, but that's not really relevant. I'm not claiming that my view is right, or that anyone should be convinced - take that up with kmeisthax if you wish.
You cannot argue that a particular usage of a word is wrong while claiming that you aren't taking a position on the definition. And if you do take a position on the definition then you must be able to justify it.
Your view on the US and voting restrictions is directly relevant. It is what I am challenging. The common definition of democracy does not (to the best of my knowledge) include anything about equality. Those are entirely separate matters. The early US is widely recognized as a democratic republic (thus a democracy), albeit one with a great deal of institutional inequality.
As for a rationale as to why I would think this: Democracy literally means "rule by the people". If you have so much institutional inequality that one guy can out-vote or veto literally everyone else, then how do the people actually rule in any meaningful way?
I will admit that this argument is very voting-centric. Democracy does not mandate the use of voting. You could, for example, have a democracy in which the exercise of democratic power is mediated entirely through protests. This is how disenfranchised populations in the US and elsewhere wound up getting suffrage in the first place. But protests are also an incredibly inconvenient means of exercising power. When the people take power the first thing they do is usually to implement a voting mechanism anyway, so it's not inherently invalid to assume that democracy implies voting.
Of course, this doesn't work in reverse: voting does not imply democracy. Shareholder voting is a system that exists specifically to ensure the people who loaned the business its start-up capital can exercise effective and indefinite control over it. This is voting built to enforce plutocracy (rule by the rich). Furthermore, the other pseudo-democratic features of publicly held companies, like the fact that anyone can push through a shareholder resolution as a form of protest, are being slowly pared away. Texas in particular is trying to pull corporations away from Delaware on the basis that they'll shut up the small activist shareholders trying to do democratic protest in their board meetings or through lawsuits. Does this still sound like democracy to you?
[0] I am skipping over a lot of internal politics among North Korea's ruling elites, but I don't think it's necessary to go into any great detail other than to mention that such people exist.
Voting is a democratic instrument, but a blunt one and not the most important.
"...those who spend five minutes voting every three years and call it democracy..."
Majoritarianism is undemocratic in that any desire less than 50% + 1 is deprecated.
If you care IMO the most important feature of a democracy is rule of law and access to the courts.
damn, I guess feudal aristocracies or oligarchical nations are also democratic.
If you are describing how a US corporation that is not a worker cooperative is run as a democracy, you either dont know what the term means or you are being in bad faith.
when a literal handful(as in the number of people could be counted between both hands) can decide the fate of tens to hundreds of thousands of people, calling it "largely democratic" is lolworthy.
Congratulations you have reinvented communism from first principles! And you are completely correct in your analysis.
That's a hilarious leap.
Look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
And in Russian I believe such a company is called a "Soviet". They idea that the main part of the economy is run by this kind of organizations is one of the best parts of the USSR's attempt at communism.
There is a vast range of ways you can regulate a corporation and only some of them qualify as communism.
Germany has worker councils, it's still not communist.
Several European countries have much stricter regulations on how companies behave that moves them from the absolute power fiefdom internal model, guess what, still not communism.
I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
There have been some govts that mandated this type of organization for part of their economy; we usually refer to that as communism.
(no value judgement here, there are day's when I'm quite a commie myself)
By contrast its relatively easy to quit and start a new company if you feel like it. That is the control for a company.
A1 Plumbing, Acme Brick, AAA Home Servicing all the companies named over the years to try and be the first in the phone book.
But phone books have been dead for a long time. And search results aren’t alphabetical. It would be interesting for someone to graph or somehow otherwise show how names have changed in response.
I have seen those occasional pictures of businesses named “(thing) near me” in an attempt to win at Google searches.
Chicago-based Sears was the largest US retailer at the time, and Chicago-based Montgomery Ward was the 5th largest.
The story is that Adi was less of a hardliner, but still a card-carrying member of the nazi party.
I used to eat there occasionally because it was cheapish many, many years ago.
It's just deli meat. Arby's is extremely open that their roast beef is deli meat roast beef. It's no different from what you find at the deli counter in your local krogers.
Have you or your friend never seen deli meat before?
Have you never seen a company lie about something?
Good lord.
How is anyone ever confused by this? Are you confused people eat taco bell? Are you confused by a cheese steak sandwich?
Not just (forking and) signing, but considering he runs the "official WordPress plug-in repository" as well, he pretty much conducted a supply chain attack.
I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP.
Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?
This isn't a joke, this is now part of my pre-launch SOP. I even have it tracking everything so I can log stuff to fix vs. known shippables vs intentional design/false positives vs. upstream stuff which doesn't have a fix available yet, and keep track of which builds have the fixes. Almost entirely automated, I mostly review the findings and do some categorization/enrichment during the pentest review stage, and do a human code review pass as patches are submitted.
Stuff that used to take me multiple hours to write a fix for and then weeks to get code reviewed and deployed now get done in minutes.
It's pretty simple, you could probably set up something like that by:
Configure some kind of CLI tool to talk to your ticketing system and git repo so you can programmatically interact with them. If you don't have a ticketing system, instruct the agent to use local text or markdown files to track issues and progress.
Ideally, make your code runnable in a way the agent can use. For my webapps I build a test harness so that I can run all the endpoints and workflows via reproducible tests against an embedded database. This is easier than it sounds, e.g. there are libraries out there to embed PostgreSQL or SQLite into source code, you can set up a test harness so you can run unit tests, integration tests and workflow tests that use your real frontend, server and database.
Paste this comment thread into the agent prompt and tell it to run a similar loop on your code base: a session that searches for vulns and writes up a report, some way for a human to do a review pass on the report, a session that indexes the reviewed findings into tickets, and sessions that fix the fixable issues and submit patches to your repo. The next search session should first read all the open issues so it doesn't duplicate work of earlier sessions.
LESS IS MORE - avoid fancy agent tooling and skills, don't cargo cult from others, build your own tools as you find your own needs. If something can be automated, use the agent to write tools and tests for it, don't just keep prodding the agent to do it.
I'm saying that every web property I've ever seen logs for is swept at least daily for /wp-admin/... and similar URLs. I've also seen WP instances left unpatched become completely taken over by spammers in a matter of days.
Any software package with an install base of 1, whether human coded or vibe coded, by junior engineers or by Fable, will not have an organized ecosystem of "webscale" exploiting, unless the property in question is of incredibly high value. In that event, dedicated black-hats and state actors will always be targeting it explicitly no matter what software it runs.
It is very empowering for people with limited skills.
I remember Facebook's corporate news sites [1] were running on WordPress.
I just checked. Some of them still are.
Oh, the irony.
[1] e.g. https://about.fb.com/news/
It's not the code or product, but the user base and time with it. Google, meta, etc aren't successful because of their product. It's because of the momentum and product scale. You could make a new Instagram easily. You can't get the user base to switch easily.
And I even get that large, complex WP-based sites at least seem to have a lot of inertia keeping them there.
I'm just saying that I'm shocked Wordpress is something that anyone thinks still has upward momentum left in it. I would expect that 50 competitors to WP would be expanding their abilities to replace it, replicating and improving all its features, adding import functionality to make that migration easy, and building their own in-house plugins that would probably work for 90% of deployments without the malware risks of the wider WP plugin world.
And yes, I get that WP is still Free Software, but in my career I've seen most businesses paying for all-inclusive "WP hosting" (including what I assume is most of the work, patching). So the competitors I'm speaking of would specifically be competing with WordPress.com SaaS, rather than the "idea" of WordPress (The software).
I guess there probably are that many alternatives, I'm just shocked the WP branding has been enough to keep it relevant despite its disadvantages, bad security reputation, and insecure architecture.
Cloudflare did that:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress/
I haven't heard of anybody but Cloudflare using it though.
Name recognition still means a lot. WordPress is baked into most hosting platforms now so SMBs just reach for it. Most of them won't hear about this b.s. and honestly the platform can continue to run on momentum for years.
There's a whole ecosystem behind WordPress that, while it's a security nightmare, is also pretty damn useful. You can't vibe code that yet, you have to build it over years, if not decades.
To be fair, I think a lot of people would have far better user experiences if they asked Claude/ChatGPT/preferred AI to rip out nag screens that many of the plugins are riddled with.
That's probably the first step to them vibecoding their own sites, but most people would likely just want to stay on the WordPress sites they already have, because they don't want to spend time and effort getting up to speed with new UX, or worse, being their own website product manager if they have to vibecode something from scratch. (Until something catastrophically breaks and they need to do a new greenfield site, I guess.)
Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 - Sept 2026 (144 comments)
Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283 - Sept 2026 (372 comments)
(I know there have been many other threads in this long saga but I don't have the time (or the stomach) to try to list them)
p.s. We merged an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683265) into this one, which is why the timestamps of some of the comments are older.
Way more are than we are told about.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.”
And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.
Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat?
Not beyond the realms of possibility then
There is a Thunderdome at Burning Man.
https://journal.burningman.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Th...
I think it said that Mullenweg always came back from burning man with lots of ideas.
The implication to me was the ideas were terrible and the board was afraid of having to deal with it yet again. But that’s a total guess.
Trust me, you don't want a CEO with "ideas."
I agree no ideas is just a path towards irrelevance.
Matt is always looking for inspiration, as we all should be. Whether it comes from Burning man or elsewhere seems irrelevant.
We/I want to build useful things. This is a distraction. I believe Automattic is a net benefit for the web and look forward to having more focus to continue delivering on that. Internally, were focused on that.
> “oh, since I’m a pirate now, I fucking curse. after 42 years of never uttering a curse word, it’s kinda fucking fun. if this is a HR problem @caron please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with @Mark Davies.” […] Mullenweg also posted that the Automattic Slack “smells funny, like turncoats” and said he was going to hang out in the WordPress.org Slack instead.
Good luck to everyone in the blast radius.
[0] https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-swears-for-th...
>However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic
What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.
Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching
Same reason a ton of us pay for AWS/GCloud/Azure instead of dealing with bare metal. (And I say this as someone running an edge fleet. If I didn't need to, I wouldn't.)
What you describe sounds more like a cleverly hidden ad. Google and others were famous for this during silicon valley's growth phase when you could get a job as a software engineer if you had heard of Java in passing and could fog a mirror.
Intent matters: a hiring campaign doesn't rise to the level of poaching unless there is some concerted effort to attract specific employees and/or talent from a specific company.
Finally, poaching is a perjorative term, but the practice of hiring another company's talent (even if they are a competitor) is not illegal or unethical. Companies SHOULD have to compete against each other for top talent.
Pocket Casts was originally developed by a South Australian startup, Shifty Jelly. Sold to a consortium of public broadcasters which included NPR. Then there was a change of heart the the public broadcasters decided that they actually don't want to be in the game, so was divested in a firesale.
Automattic has picked up a few of these assets for peanuts, Tumblr and Pocket Casts are amongst them. All are assets which were once much more high flying, but still have a core of dedicated users/fans.
A more optimistic, less chaotic and exasperating time.
About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.
Because it’s a plugin for WP you might not ever notice a store is Woocommerce until you get the store emails that people often don’t customise much and have an identifiable look to them.
It’s fully possible to run a simple Woocommerce store without giving anyone a cut beyond your payment provider’s normal fees.
It’s not too difficult to extend; custom payment gateways and order processing hooks, inbound APIs, GraphQL etc.
If you are judicious about your install — just run Woocommerce, WP, customise one of the core themes or a well-known good theme like WP-Start or an Anders Noren theme, use the Stripe or Paypal payment gateway —- it’s pretty solidly secure, too; you’ll get automatic updates.
It’s definitely not the most fun thing to configure and administer, but it’s not Magento at least. I have never enjoyed that.
Automattic’s acquisition of Woocommerce was absolutely a blessing at the time. Some of the more complex extensions to Woocommerce are paid addons, which is where they make their money (as well as payment gateway referral fees, which was a little-noticed part of the squabble with WP Engine, who modified Woocommerce to change the referrer to point to them). Woothemes (the previous owner) were unpredictable and a little rapacious; they changed their pricing in ways that caused concern (and Woocommerce itself started as an acrimonious and hostile fork of a plugin called Jigoshop).
I would really like to stop using WP over time, and it feels more urgent each time an Automattic story hits the headlines.
But I don’t think there are many better small e-commerce offerings than Woocommerce that offer that level of open-source control or cost control for people who need to run a modestly large store on a true shoestring.
Source? This source [0] puts Shopify 10x ahead of WooCommerce on GMV. They're close on number of installations. That roughly matches my experience working in this space in 2022, though it's definitely possible our customers weren't representative of the market as a whole.
[0] https://www.sanjaydey.com/shopify-vs-woocommerce-why-brands-...
> They're close on number of installations.
2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
It's true that the link puts Shopify at roughly 10X in terms of GMV but parent did not claim otherwise.
> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations
And as for this:
> 2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
No, I wouldn't. I think that's within the margin of error for the typical methodology of this kind of research. They're the same number.
I did clearly write a mangled sentence, after midnight. It’s wrongly constructed, you are right to say so.
WooCommerce isn’t bad, acquiring it was a good call for Automattic, but to put it in the same league as Shopify is pure fantasy.
As for cost control, I’m not sure why you think Shopify is more expensive. Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify is expensive because migrations are expensive but day to day running costs are pretty much equivalent.
https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/WooCommerce-Checkou...
https://trends.builtwith.com/shop
And keep in mind most major Shopify users are building out their own front ends so these BuiltWith numbers are underreporting on big Shopify customers, whereas WooCommerce is almost never used without a WordPress front end. These are the most favorable numbers to WooCommerce and they are still bad.
edit: it’s even worse than I thought. Woo’s own stats cite storeleads.app which lists the biggest Woo stores as… some blogs? Shopify has most of the top stores from brands we all recognize. Woo has zero. Woo’s involvement in actual commerce is pitiful, I think 1% of Shopify is optimistic.
edit edit: one of Woo’s most popular stores is billyparisi.com. A recipe website that sells a couple of t-shirts. A WordPress blog that drives all of the traffic and a WooCommerce tacked on for the sake of it. And that’s one of Woo’s best.
I did write a mangled sentence late at night and you are correct to object to it.
But you seem kind of angry and have decided something about me, and are now cherrypicking things off the woocommerce site to try to make me look foolish (as if that site’s gallery is necessarily authoritative?)
Did I explicitly say “shopify is more expensive”, for one thing? You are putting those words in my mouth.
However. I just looked at the numbers. Shopify starts at £19 per month. I could set up a speculative woocommerce store on good hosting for about £40 per year.
Several of the people I have set up stores for over the years have had no certainty that they would make a sale for months and yet needed customisations in their setup that no hosted e-commerce company could offer in their cheap plans.
I have written dynamic product functionality, installed weird extensions, even used Wordpress as the prototype storefront in a multi-vendor, multi-supplier fulfilment network demo.
Woocommerce exists. It functions. It can be rolled out for tiny, tiny money on hosting you control and can customise. It is OK. Not that fun to administer but it’s a complete open source store with a huge ecosystem. It’s exceptionally widely deployed. For people who want to run shoestring customised store experiments or sell on tiny margins or for charities, it’s clearly an option.
> Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
You said that WooCommerce is more widely deployed than Shopify. Yes, it is installed as a WordPress plugin on more websites than Shopify but that is completely meaningless when discussing whether WooCommerce is an "also-ran" compared to Shopify.
So, if your comment was intended only to explain that WooCommerce is a widely installed Shopify plugin, I apologize for suggesting you have something in common with Matt, but your comment read to me (and I guess everyone else) like you were saying WooCommerce isn't an also-ran and is an important product for online commerce. It isn't, in the context of business, it doesn't belong in the same conversation as Shopify or any other serious commerce business.
(e.g. just this afternoon: Godin guitars. One of the longer-established multi-brand companies in the guitar world.)
And embedded in really odd stuff, like behind member walls — companies selling spare parts for washing machines and hoovers, all of that stuff. It's absolutely the long tail of ecommerce.
I will grant you that in the last year or two some pretty big stores (particularly in the media and music world) have migrated to Shopify (they have a tool for that).
I don't blame them for migrating away and it's not hard to see purely strategic reasons why they would that are tied into all of this nonsense with Matt's very obvious implosion. Like I said in my comment, I'd prefer not to be running WP at all.
But a lot of the work I do is at the very small, very speculative or very custom end of things. I'm looking for various ways out that still let me help individual people.
But even if I don't personally use WP, the fact that something like 25% of the web runs on software which this lunatic has this much control over, is problematic in itself.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.” Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.”
And like all well-run companies, it's not clear who the ceo is.
See if you can think of any other interesting historical events that happened when the whole leadership and rank and file were on prescription amphetamines.
SV has always had it's weird outliers but they do seem more for want of a better word - manic lately and much less outliers.
People in power absolutely do have an incentive to over-medicate themselves, and I'd be shocked if that didn't extend to SV tech leaders.
I always forget how geeked out these folks probably are and so I appreciate the reminder here.
About two days a month of my time is spent handing out bubbles and points to folks to get them to better manage their habits (in addition to other street medicine stuff). Stimulant culture is very foreign to my own chemistry, but yeah, the idea that most of these folks are just gakd up all the time certainly lines up with my experiences debraiding hobo feet.
I'm similarly not personally familiar with ketamine, but i've been doing first aid at festivals this year and understanding that most of the folks running the stuff in the US are on some spectrum of chemical impairment has been very helpful.
I don't miss drinking, but it was helpful in understanding the mindset at least.
If folks are interested in an ivy league business education but can't afford the tuition and life changes, I suggest that they can learn much of what it's like to be around a bunch of folks with poor impulse control and who are on a bunch of stimulants by volunteering with their local street medic group. The aesthetics are different but the general decision making processes seem very similar to me.
If you are poor and mentally ill, you are crazy, if you are rich you are eccentric.
If you are poor and a felon you can't vote, if you are rich and a felon you can win the presidency.
It very much is a two tier system and guess what, statistically if you are reading this you aren't in that fortunate tier.
From the eyes of a Musk or an Altman none of us matter and there isn't much difference between us and someone on the street using drugs.
Stuff like that, channeled into being the CEO.
This whole thing seems like baseless fear-mongering against adhd meds because they are chemically similar to meth. If you can show me some actual strong evidence I would be willing to look at it. All I am seeing so far in this comment chain is some wild false equivalents between natzi’s meth use and prescription adhd meds along with vague claims of harm.
I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.
But apparently he's booted out the admins who would be able to do anything (from the slack at least) while stating to the public everything has been resolved. This is astonishing and I would argue at least as unhinged as the activity for which the board was removing him.
So what happens when the courts get involved?
Because "he won, because he was the only one with the passwords," seems like a software engineer fantasy.
The board wants to make money, that's why they hold shares and positions. If Mullenweg has the power to destroy value, that will be powerful leverage over them. If his employees side with him, if he holds the accounts, they'll have to negotiate carefully.
Of course, you would need a lawyer to determine when this crosses from a civil dispute to a criminal dispute because at some point him using the keys when he's not authorized could be a crime and if they can get the cops involved that certainly changes the dynamic.
They're almost certainly going to get sued by minority shareholders over this.
Didn't a Board member resign today?
Which is really insane when you think about it. The CEO reports to the board, and since when have companies regularly provided real reasons for termination (I understand they try to say as little as possible, because there's no upside for them)?
It's a coup when an underling "fires" his boss and takes control, but some CEOs managed to convince many that it's the opposite (or at least AstroTurf to that effect).
This should discourage investors, since an unbridled CEO is bad for them in the long term. But it won’t, because nobody thinks long term anymore.
Did OpenAI have a corporate board try to fire Sam? Or a non-profit board?
Between a corporate board with a fiduciary obligation to its shareholders and a non-profit board with more-ambiguous responsibilities.
Also, Sam didn't pretend to be CEO after he was fired. He rallied to undo the decision.
On the “good for the board” side:
1. OpenAI from the POV of investors has both a pretty high p(massive returns) and a pretty high p(no returns). Even if they’re convinced AI is going to swallow the economy, that doesn’t mean OpenAI wins that. This discourages risky moves.
2. The range in outcomes from a Matt-less Automattic are much less varied than for OpenAI. Replacing him isn’t going to sink the company but it’s also not going to have a massive increase in valuation. It’s purely a decision that he’s a risk factor with his behaviour.
3. I’m sure there’s many good staff members in Automattic, but the work they do is pretty standard and understood, so there’s fewer irreplaceable individuals if any of them quit in support of Matt.
4. Because OpenAI is relatively new and has had such high growth, there were both a lot of true believers among the staff that it had to be Altman, and people who had a significant portion of their net worth locked into yet untradable shares that did not want the boat rocked.
5. What openAI hopes to achieve in marketing and policy requires a figurehead and only Altman had mass recognition. Matt’s public awareness is much lower and Automattic’s need for a public facing figurehead is lower.
In the pro-Matt factors:
1. Altman did not have an outright majority of the shares, Matt does
2. He did somewhat prepare by doing waves of voluntary severance to get his internal opponents to leave
Dario already showed there was an appetite for this.
I’m not saying it was right or moral, just probably inevitable.
That changes everything, he can just fire the board members, he's the actual boss (as shareholder) even when he's also their employee (as CEO).
> Wu retains control of the Chinese unit via his possession of the company stamp which is necessary in China to authorize important bureaucratic procedures.
Chop is another word for the stamp.
(For personal seals. I don't know what company seals involve.)
Official seals use uncommon font styles and are hand carved natural materials, such that each one has a unique microfeatures inherent to the wood, stone, or horn used, which develop unique wear and ink absorption characteristics.
These official seals are registered and become official for specific scopes of use; some are solely for banking and separate from the other uses like contracts and official filings: which prevents corporate partners and official channels from potentially exposing the banking seals.
The vanity type seals can be used for informal things like putting your name on homework or stamping a package delivery receipt for items of trivial value such as Amazon basics, but it is illegal to use mass produced stamps for official legal or banking.
Given your username, I have to say I'm curious why that is.
The only difference is that demonstrated in the described case, that the stamp is expected to be passed on to whomever is in authority, whereas we would never say "This CEO can't be ousted as he refused to relinquish his signature."
Usage, sure. It's a lot worse in terms of identification value; signatures can be forged, but signing seals look identical to each other by design. Nobody is going to produce an exact replica of your signature by accident, but with seals that's routine.
Or, in the words of my friend, 橡皮章的大小，字体都一样的 [rubber seals' size and font are all the same].
(I had asked her whether she had a seal herself. She confirmed that she has one, and sent me an image very similar to this: https://img1.baidu.com/it/u=3145542370,421755251&fm=253&fmt=... . But she noted that Chinese personal seals are more likely to be square than round.)
Not to mention the god awful "sign here" on delivery tablets, I just make a random squiggle because it never works properly.
If employees can be persuaded to move themselves + systems to a board controlled chat instance, that's an angle, but Mullenweg has stronger cards if he's liked by employees.
Speaking generally (not about Automattic), big SaaS have law enforcement desks that work on exactly this type of thing, and the "terrible precedent" is already widely set. Plenty of law enforcement outreach (which includes lawyers, courts, and actual law enforcement officials) results in pre-emptive compliance by SaaS companies. I would be massively surprised if Slack has not already done this in many cases, because most huge companies routinely do.
That's neither generally good nor generally bad; whether it's the right move depends on the charge, requested actions by law enforcement, status of legal proceedings, and the values/diligence by which the SaaS business assesses the legitimacy and likely cost/benefit of a law enforcement request. Note that "pre-emptive compliance" doesn't always mean an email saying "hey, the FBI said you suck so we terminated your account". There's a broad spectrum of tools available to a SaaS ranging from sending that email, to holding bespoke contract re-negotiations (which are functionally always in process between a SaaS and a huge customer) hostage to endless redlining rounds, to enforcing ToS violations that the SaaS previously turned a blind eye towards due to customer size.
> Whatever the legal process this battle follows, it will be a year or two before it's even possible for a final ruling + court order
Preliminary injunctions can be issued in days to weeks, not months to years, in all sorts of civil and criminal cases in all sorts of jurisdictions. Those can take the form of "don't change stuff with your admin access" or "grant admin control to someone else"-type orders. In cases where a service administrator is materially involved, injunctions are also easy to get on the basis of evidence preservation.
That's a pretty sharp tool. Failure to comply with those opens individuals and businesses up to way more legal penalties and tighter timeframes. Even if an injunction is later vacated/dismissed/modified, the legal argument that you violated it because you knew that would happen is an extremely tough sell.
Edit: I take that back, [1] this guy got prison time. Do Chamath next.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-ceo-special-purp...
Up until recently (and my intervention) my work had multiple aws accounts tied to individual people, where they had inherited a personal account into the billing org.
There are also, in business use, some domains where an executive personally owns the registration but has delegated DNS into the company. There is no written agreement.
A former employer completely lost access to a couple of social media accounts (twitter/$company, etc) after laying off enough people.
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Yeah, not a chance I disable an adblocker for TechCrunch slop reporting
I don’t think this is over until the board releases a statement. CEOs can pontificate all they want but at the end of the day the board is legally in charge of and the final say at a company. 99.99% of the time it’s just the CEO saying everything and the board quietly giving their blessing out of view. This is the 0.01% where everyone actually wants the board to speak, loudly and clearly.
To be clear, Matt seems to have stolen Automattic's assets. That drops into several categories of shareholder lawsuit and potentially criminal behaviour.
The board of the parent ARM company fired him. He just kept going like the China unit was his company.
I don’t know how that ended.
https://www.nme.com/news/arm-china-finally-ousts-rogue-ceo-t...
If you cannot escalate a governance issue to a higher power, the controls are not worth the paper they are written on.
Similar to a government coup where you need to control the money and the military.
ETA: Or better yet a clearer statement that nothing about this is clear.
Did anyone else think "what the fuck did I just read" after this sentence? Did Matt write it himself while posing as a "spokesperson"? This reads like that time Trump wrote in pseudonymously to a newspaper about how amazing and perfect Trump was.
Oh, I hadn't finished reading. The whole article is a WTF did I just read.
If you look up their career histories on LinkedIn, some of them are rising pretty quickly within the Automattic ranks.
Which would be terrible if true.
I've actually never seen anything like it. Is this what the WP community are like? I think that would break me too.
Microsoft has done plenty of awful things in its day, but I've never seen people diagnose Steve Ballmer with mental disorders and wish him harm, let alone that would become just the accepted majoritarian narrative around him, as it seems to be around Matt Mullenweg. It seems wild.
More broadly, why is there a 'WP drama' sub-Reddit? Why are there blogs documenting all of this with glee? Why are people registering domains to post screeds about this? In other words, why has a cottage industry sprung up around - as far as I can tell - bullying Matt Mullenweg?
I don't know what to make of it. Who are the WP community, that this is how they engage? Is there some big 4chan-WordPress overlap I'm not aware of? Is this an outgrowth of teenage faux-radicalism off Tumblr? I genuinely don't know, but it seems very off-putting. If this is what the WP community are like, I sure wouldn't want to become involved in it.
That's an oddly specific thing to clarify upfront.
Microsoft has had its controversies, but the reason the interest became personal here is it seems this was his own initiative (he kicked everything off with a public blog post).
And once again in this case, it looks like a bunch of chaotic behaviour centred on the individual more-so than standard "unpopular corporate decision making". That sort of thing has a big PR blast radius and has exposed him to criticism more than necessary (or normal).
Given how avoidable the above is (by simply operating through his lawyers / the organisation), it's feeding speculation on his mental state.
And you seem to know way too much about this to be "not involved at all in WP".
Is the WP community toxic? No, it's absolutely lovely. But there is a dark cloud over everything when it comes to the project's direction and governance.
Mullenweg yields enormous power and is famously vindictive, so people can't speak up in healthier ways. I think this is the result; when a leader constantly wields his power to destroy critics, they tend to move underground.
But nobody posts this stuff "with glee". Quite the contrary.
(For the record, I think some of the critique goes over the line as well, but that's just the internet. I don't think it's as prominent as your comment seems to imply).
1. He should probably go back on his bipolar medication, even if he feels less creative on it. 2. Paying for the surgery his mother died during really messed up his head. Partly because he probably blames himself, partly because she was one of the few stabilizing influences in his life. He really started going downhill after.
He might have always been impulsive-grandstanding-interrupt-Taylor-Swift Kanye, but it's conceivable he wouldn't have morphed into slavery-is-a-state-of-mind-"i-love-hitler"-antisemitic Kanye.
Sigh. "I miss the old Kanye." Time to give 808s and Heartbreak a re-listen.
Or coming down from amphetamines.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/159-employees-are-leaving-...
[2] https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-ma...
Facebook is a good example on how to structure your company to keep control of it.
Facebook, when, Meta took a bunch of bad decisions in recentyears. All that Metaverse is just a write off ... for now the stock market liked the "vision" but that may end.
How willing investor's then are to play such a game is to be seen. I guess this only works in exceptional cases. Facebook was a money printing machine everybody wanted to be a part of.
Yes, there's a lot of lessons we can take away from Facebook. Most are not positive lessons, mind you.
If founders are willing to self-finance or finance based on cash-flow/collateral, that's a different story. But if you're selling majority stakes of your company's equity to others in order to finance your operations and growth, the equity owners should get a majority vote in how your company runs.
By not selling the controlling majority stake in their company, or retain super-voting rights. Anything to not give anyone the possibility to take their company from them.
I'm afraid in this case, this "should never" barely makes Mullenweg's top 10.
As someone that’s pretty much worked in/with WP for my entire career, it’s always seemed like the worst of both worlds - distributed and slow-moving, yet still ultimately controlled to a massive extent by a single individual.
These kinds of absurd situations just slowly push people toward Shopify, other CMSes, etc. There will be no grand exodus, because too many companies are intertwined to the WP ecosystem. But combined with AI, the horrible design of Gutenberg, and half a dozen other things, I really worry for the future of WP. At this point I generally only recommend it to people that need something extremely customized. Other platforms are easier to use and don’t have the soap opera drama.
I also specifically did not merely say that being controlled by one person was bad, but that it was bad in the context of also being slow at decision making. In many cases having a single decision maker is a must for being dynamic.
Haven’t heard of Solidus, but I’ll check it out.
Shopify's CEO was in the news just recently for arguing that rich people should be able to cast more votes. That's the most naked anti-democracy stance I've heard in ages.
(And this is before we get into funding "deport-the-foreigners-and-minorities" DHH's Omarchy.)
I say this as someone who has recently helped a few friends move their ecom stores off shopify, and wow, I didn't know such a horrible paradigm could exist. I genuinely think it would be easier for someone to learn a web stack in 2026 than learn to piece together whatever spaghetti monster shopify, and similar hacks are.
Every single one of them I saw so far has the same bad faith attacks, claiming that that guy's mental health would be compromised - and then nothing else other than implying that corporate processes are correct and you are to shut up.
Are there real people with opinions about this? I'd like to hear them.
He's clinging to what he has, and for any outsider this (or the path leading to this) doesn't look like healthy behavior.
What we live through life can trigger extremely strange behaviors we didn't see before from people, so I don't think all of this can be attributed to astroturfing.
Every comment section on the internet is a target for astroturfing, yet attribute everything to it, is not right.
Which.. kinda doesn't really convince me.
But anyway
> He's clinging to what he has, and [..] this [..] doesn't look like healthy behavior.
That's not something I would agree with. Can you explain why you believe that protecting "your baby" and clinging to it is seen by you as "not healthy"? From my understanding of the world, that is very healthy.
Why not?
Sometimes a broadly one sided reaction is just a broadly one sided reaction, no conspiracy needed.
Yeah that mechanism I understand, and I do understand that this would lead to exactly this kind of politics.
But.. that still means that it leads to this kind of politics, which was my point.
I'm not interested in the politics. I'd like to know the reality.
We're going to gloss over that I didn't say that, aren't we?
Very much so
I honestly do not see what you're saying there, but I also have no people in my life that would be using prescription stimulants. So it's not impossible that I have an experience gap there.
That's because the substantive discussion happened in 2024 when this whole mess started. He was commenting here - which resulted in screenshots showing up in federal court filings - in deeply unwise fashion.
It's just sad now.
This would check out indeed for me, as it would invoke the same responses as an astroturfing campaign in normal people, as the whole "social cohesion" stuff would pull them towards trying to shut stuff down and re-establish coherent reality. By any means necessary and as they see fit.
So that's a hypothesis that would satisfy the data given.
Page 24, for example: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
I see what you mean with "unwise", though, I would not say that it would validate the bad faith attacks I'm seeing.
After all, all he did there is show his hand, which (possibly) hurt him in court.
I suppose the takeaway there is that page 24 proves that his intent was to do harm, and that's why there's this counter-reaction by people that feel harmed, but that still makes stuff exactly as bad faith as it smells.
But we do not need to discuss this further (unless you have further thoughts), as stuff now makes sense to me.
So thanks again!
In the aftermath of that news, he personally wrote blog posts and participated in comment sections, getting deep into the weeds of arguments and going into personal attacks in ways that seemed unflatteringly blow back on him. And seemingly neutral third parties watching these events have found his actions hard to justify and he seems to have alienated a lot of the Wordpress ecosystem (though by no means all and it's hard to quantify that kind of thing).
And here, if you read the article (and if the article is basically right in its details), he seems to be outrightly defying a decision of his own board in a brazen power play. I don't think unhinged is a controversial characterization of his choices both to flex power and get into personal attacks leading up to this point, and this seems like yet another entry.
So try looking at the face value of the events being reported before treating the reaction like it must be astroturfing. If you don't read about it, you won't have the context to know what the comments are reacting to.
There are a lot of people in this comment section repeating this as if it was an act of heresy, but I kinda do not see why one would do that?
I'd like to see terms like "unhinged" to stay reserved for non-made-up structures. Stuff where someone genuinely harms other people and not just their financial wants/needs/etc.
The board itself of course wants people to believe that it has power and not following its orders is wrong, but that's just.. their opinion. And they rely on someone actually believing that.
It is genuinely weird to me to keep reading this, because it's normal people defending how power structures in which they are not winning work. Why would one do that? What do you care if a board is respected?
I kinda get the general desire for "order" thing and all, but boards - generally speaking - do not get there through merit or a democratic mandate, nor do they act in the interest of normal people, so.. why care if he pisses his board off?
Care to the degree that is being cared here, I mean.
Should he be doing this? Probably not. But the immediate "victim" of it is most likely just a group of people with equally deep pockets doing exactly the same kind of brazen power play. I don't see why that would get strong emotions out of normal workers.
Unless of course it's not them at all. Hence that suspicion.
__
I've consulted the LLM about this, and while doing so, I've remembered that Boards usually are full of VCs, and YC is VC, so.
Yeah, I can see why not respecting the board would be seen as heresy here. Weird how all the money in the world cannot buy one everything, huh?
I think I can tell from how you're talking about boards that you're underestimating how many there are, how varied they are (non profits, community theaters, land trusts, boring but non-scandalous corporate governance) and how diverse their cultures and missions can be. And we don't need vague shower thoughts about how you think "most" boards work when there's a lot of reported detail about the Wordpress drama that sets the context for their operating conditions with a lot more specificity than your guesstimations.
It should be enough to note that the details coming straight out of the reporting are inflammatory enough to the average person that it can explain why there's a negative reaction against Mullenweg without having to assume it was astroturfed, which was the point you were originally making.
> If you don't use contracts, you don't have any contracts to worry about. If you don't have a tour rider, you don't have a tour rider to argue about. If you don't have a booking agent, you don't have a booking agent to argue with.
> To us, every moment we remained unfettered and in control was a success. We never had a manager. We never had a booking agent. We never had a lawyer. We never took an advance from a record company. We booked our own tours, paid our own bills, made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences. The results of that methodology speak for themselves: Nobody ever told us what to do, and nobody took any of our money.
If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.
I was just having a discussion about this with a friend who watched an NYU hosted debate in the 90s between the guy I can't remember from Sick Of It All and Sam McPheeters from Born Against. Born Against had been trolling Sick Of It All for ages (because it was fun), putting up posters, passing out fliers around their shows and talking about them for signing to a major label and distributor, and especially for censoring their lyric sheet in order to get sold at Walmart. Born Against was traditional DIY, on Sam's record label (Vermiform), didn't have bar codes on their records, mostly mailorder, etc.
Both were right, McPheeters was right that Sick Of It All had sold out and censored themselves in order to fit into corporate commerce, but the guy from Sick Of It All was more right. His position was that Born Against (like a Steve Albini) were rich middle class kids who were just having fun, and Sick Of It All were from working class families that they had to support. Music can be the most important thing for hobbyists, but that kind of music is just music. They on the other hand were looking for a ticket to a better life, and one that allowed them to do what they were good at and what they enjoyed.
So Born Against and their style ended up aped by the corporations, and spreads into emocore and all that shit, makes the companies billions, and Sam McPheeters ends up with zero of that. He's fine, he's writing columns for the Atlantic and doing interviews with NPR (incidentally because wealthy people pay to be close to "cool" people.) Meanwhile the style of music represented by Sick Of It All pretty much runs its course, but the members pocket a bunch of cash, and get to move on to do whatever else they want.
Purity is a privilege of the already wealthy. A lot of people chose Wordpress because it was the cheapest functional option (Free.) They were not interested in writing their own CMS, and couldn't afford to anyway.
> If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.
Also in respect to Mullenweg, afaik he owns 84% of the company. This never had a chance without his consent.
He has proxy agreements with Automattic's investors for 84% of the vote. I don't know how they're structured, but I saw from other discussions that they may be irrevocable.
If you can pull a bunch of shenanigans to get around being fired by your bosses, then the system isn't working.
> photomatt
...hmm. Guess we'll just have to wait a couple hours.
Uhhh, that's not normal... is it?
Although I guarantee they would run it into the ground without him. I just have a feeling. The people going after Mullenweg are not backseat drivers, they're backseat critics. They have no idea how to drive, they just know when other people are doing it wrong.
If you don't want people like Mullenweg treating your business like a toy, try not having an internet monoculture. There were plenty of competitors to Wordpress that didn't have an insane database schema, but web programmers are herd animals. Somehow they made the only competitor with traction Drupal, which was way worse. You all chose to hitch your wagon to Mullenweg (and DHH for that matter), now it's their wagon.
They both also made it easy to fork at any time, which is evidence that their enemies are parasites imo. Mullenweg is literally fighting private equity that doesn't want to host their own infrastructure because it wouldn't be profitable, but they also don't want to contribute. And the internet cries for them, because the internet was looking for a bargain.
There were many other decent competitors when WordPress was first forked like Movable Type and Textpattern. Many people I know also used LiveJournal and their forks heavily, and of course there was the Blogger crowd.
For CMS, there was PHPNuke, PostNuke, Joomla, Mambo, but they were all for "professional" website developers, not for people unfamiliar with web development and just looking to muck around.
I think WordPress took off mainly because the web crowd rallied around it for their then-good design and taste. Plugins and "good enough" themes were another moat — I think it helped that plugins let people install just enough rope to hang themselves with (or: they get to decide the level of complexity they're comfortable with), unlike the ready-built CMSes which bundled everything and the kitchen sink.
Now, I have no idea why most of the early WordPress community chose to rally around and elevate Matt Mullenweg, but I personally think he wrote well and had good taste back in the days.