In September 2026, Automattic's board put its founder on paid leave and named the CFO interim CEO. Two days later, Matt Mullenweg told the company he was back in control. It was a strange week for a man who had spent two decades giving away the thing the company was built on.
Go back to Houston. Mullenweg was born there in 1984 and grew up in the Willowbend neighbourhood. His father, a programmer, brought computers into the house early. Childhood migraines kept the boy out of school for long stretches, which matters: a kid who loses weeks at a time learns to fill them with something. He went to Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and studied jazz on saxophone.
Childhood migraines kept the boy out of school for long stretches, which matters: a kid who loses weeks at a time learns to fill them with something.
What almost nobody pictures is the Mullenweg who never finished college. He spent two years at the University of Houston, reading philosophy and political science, and left in 2004 to take a job at CNET. In 2002 he had started blogging on an open-source tool called b2/cafelog. When its developer stopped maintaining it, Mullenweg took over in 2003, then forked it with Mike Little. That fork was WordPress.
CNET hired him in October 2004 and let him work on WordPress part-time, and moved him to San Francisco. In 2005 he founded Automattic to build a business on it. The strange part was a choice about ownership: in 2010 the WordPress trademarks and source code went to the non-profit WordPress Foundation.
The company grew by purchase. Gravatar came in 2007, then IntenseDebate and Polldaddy, WooCommerce in 2015, Tumblr in 2019 and Parse.ly in 2022. A 2014 round of $160 million valued it at about $1.16 billion, and Salesforce Ventures led a $300 million round at $3 billion in 2019. Wikipedia puts a 2021 valuation at $7.5 billion.
Then the fights. In September 2024 a public dispute with WP Engine over the WordPress trademark led more than 8% of staff to resign after Mullenweg offered severance to those who disagreed. In April 2025, 16% of staff were laid off.
The sources offer no interviews about how he felt. They do show a pattern: a boy who spent long stretches at home found a project that belonged to everybody, then later fought to control what it meant. The lesson for founders is uncomfortable. Giving a thing away is easy at 19, and holding it together is the hard part at 40.