Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork

I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that Matt Mullenweg is in desperate need of an intervention. Seriously, the man should seek professional help.

I've been saying this on twitter for months now. I don't believe this is a mentally healthy individual. His continued defence of his behavior with the whole "if you knew what was happening you would understand" style responses indicates he's lost in the sauce.

If he's not having some sort of mental health crisis it really begs to question how we got here with someone like him running those organizations for this long.

If he is, and he makes it out of this state, I feel for the emotions he's going to have to deal with when he sees (with a different perspective) what he's done to what is ultimately his life's work.

It's sad. All the way around, truly just sad.

If you're in leadership it's a good idea to get some outside advisors/mentor/muse.

Hard to find but, much cheaper than a lawyer. Many times just rubber-ducking the problem with someone can help build a more complete thought experiment.

I thought that too until you go down the rabbit hole and realize it's been this way since apparently the beginning. It's also interesting to note just how hard everyone was tearing the author apart in the comments only for it to basically become true a decade later.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110117190122/http://wpblogger....

I guess money is just some force multiplier for negative aspects of someone's personality. Just never get to see it in the beginning.

That guy was right predicting conflicts. The comments on that post are something.

I think the conflict of interest is obvious, but most people did not know about it. I think it is so glaring that I would have assumed it would not have been set up like this.

> guess money is just some force multiplier for negative aspects of someone's personality.

I think there is an element of seeing himself as the good guy and therefore entitled to things as a reward.

Nah, this is just what they call “mask off.” The amount of people like this at the top of orgs is not small, nor is this atypical. One could speculate as to the many reasons why this has become more obvious over or they’ve felt emboldened to make this clear over the past 10 years or so, but I’ll leave it to others to draw their own conclusions.

“If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity.”

Presuming he has a problem. What makes your think you think he would welcome intervention, or seek professional help, or respond to help?

He's clearly ignoring blunt feedback, and I've yet to see anything that suggests he thinks he's doing anything wrong.

Our society has been validating his behaviour with his half-billion dollar business: clearly some of his behaviour has value. Our society seems to reward and encourage similar behaviours in other founders (especially in current zeitgeist).

Sadly in my experience we don't have many options to help, and sometimes all we can do is watch someone burn themselves and those around them down.

He's losing his game and I can't see Automattic surviving the reshuffle that's coming. Business clients hate this shit and they have agency. Matt has been giving employees non-voting shares (a different class): https://ma.tt/2024/10/owner-mentality/ although he owns 84% of the normal shares (although details of control depend on agreement with investors).

The saddest thing is that I'd guess he will toxically blame Jason Cohen. I'm sure Jason can deal with it (surely dealt with in past) and Jason seems smart enough to take strong advantage of the opportunity he's been gifted by Matt.

Let him destroy Wordpress with his antics. Something better will emerge and it’ll not have this man-child at the helm.

Doesn't he seem to be following the trend: Embracing contempt for anything but ego and power? That's what Musk does, prioritizing those things over profit and the well-being of his businesses. Zuckerberg is all in, so are many others. It's 'founder mode'. In a way, they are following Trump.

Why treat it like a novel case, or like he has a mental health issue - unless all these people do.

That’s a brilliant snapshot. Thanks for sharing. It also really shows the value of things like archive.org — this context would otherwise be lost if a site disappears.

It’s also inspiring to see how Ben handled most of the comments/criticism.

Same for Elon. He still runs several companies.

See also your presidents (current and next), both not fit for any job.

not really - there's a lot of existing investment in wordpress which would be lost if this is the case.

I think it's better for wordpress community to push out Mullenweg, and establish a community owned source. It is both a fork, but not just of the source code.

I think surviving this sort of disaster makes the whole stronger/resilient in the future. Starting anew will surely just have history repeat.

Is Jason still at WPEngine?

“Something better will emerge” could be a libre fork of the project without him. He is the problem.

But also technically it would be (inertia not withstanding) good if the project were replaced with something else, something better.

Django with plugins could be made to look like and work similar to Wordpress I bet.

Pushing out a founder is fine and all and I’m here for it to happen.

> Django with plugins could be made to look like and work similar to Wordpress I bet.

https://wagtail.org/ is a solid CMS

> could be a libre fork of the project

They should call it PressWord.

Then get a ton of free publicity when Microsoft sues them.

Thank you for the "direct link to the bottom of the rabbit hole". This article makes the point clearly and succinctly.

I like FreePress or LibrePress

> Matt Mullenweg is in desperate need of an intervention. Seriously, the man should seek professional help.

The generosity inherent in this sentiment is fundamentally a mistake. Mullenweg will keep dominating his domain if people cannot even recognize that he's an adversary, not a friend in need.

And supposedly Matt tried to get him fired for this post!

>TLDR. In May 2010 Ben Cook wrote a post titled Why Matt should resign. [..] The post, a well-balanced, well-argued, and respectful post, was not liked by Mr. Mullenweg, who reached out to Ben Cook’s employer, Network Solutions, and tried to get Ben Cook fired. Network Solutions did not fire Ben Cook.

Why? Because THAT POST "borders on hate speech"

https://kindness.is/examples/2010/mullenweg-the-coward/

FWIW, Matt has never claimed to own 84%. He's only ever claimed to "control" that percentage. Presumably, some investors have assigned him their voting rights by proxy. Oops.

Thanks for sharing. I had no idea about them. Taking a look

I'm a Python fan condescending on PHP, but doesnt the world still depend on deploying instantly via FTP and cheap hosts enjoying the low overhead of a 100000 sites on a server? On the other hand, cheapest Namecheap and Digitalocean plans are neck to neck on first glance.