Thirty-Three Hours, Start to Finish
On September 9, 2026, Automattic's board voted to put founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg on paid leave and named chief financial officer Mark Davies interim CEO. Mullenweg says four people made that call: Davies, and directors Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider and Sue Decker.
It did not last. Mullenweg says he holds roughly 84 percent of Automattic's voting shares, and by September 12 he had used that control to retake the CEO seat, remove or accept the resignations of every director involved, and post in the company's Slack that he was back in charge. The whole episode, board vote to full reversal, ran 33 hours.
The Detail Nobody Planned to Explain
Here is the part that outlasts the headline: on September 10, while Mullenweg was still on leave, interim CEO Mark Davies and chief legal officer Andy Missan signed reciprocal severance agreements for each other. Each deal carried 12 months of base salary as a lump sum, accelerated equity vesting, the right to exercise vested options and a year of extra health coverage, a combined $8.15 million between two men.
The agreements also defined "cause" for termination narrowly enough to make the payouts hard to refuse on legal grounds. When Mullenweg regained control, he fired both men anyway, and Automattic's own lawyers, working with newly hired outside counsel Susman Godfrey, are now the ones who have to decide whether to honor or fight severance terms two departing executives wrote for each other in the final hours of a leadership fight they were about to lose.
A Board With No Governance Track Record
The new board has no corporate governance track record between its four members, a sharp change from the directors who left.
| Seat | Who | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Departed director | Toni Schneider | Automattic founding CEO, now CEO of Bluesky |
| Departed director | Sue Decker | Former Yahoo president, veteran public-company board member |
| Removed director | Ann Dunwoody | Retired US Army general, first woman to reach four-star rank |
| New director | Hugh Howey | Science fiction author, the Silo series |
| New director | Amy Chan | Author, Breakup Bootcamp |
| New director | Henry Khachatryan | Co-founder of IRL, a social app shut down after its users turned out to be mostly bots |
What This Means If Your Business Runs on WordPress
Nothing changes in WordPress, WooCommerce, Tumblr, Jetpack or Day One today, and that is exactly the point worth sitting with. A board fight at most companies drags on for months through proxy contests and courtroom filings; this one opened and closed inside two days because one shareholder controls enough of the vote to make an actual board check structurally impossible.
Businesses that build on Automattic's products, and there are a great many running WordPress, are effectively trusting one person's judgment for the next crisis too, whether that is another executive departure, an activist investor or a legal fight like the one still running against WP Engine. A governance dispute this fast is not a sign the system worked. It is a sign there was no system to test.
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