A failed boardroom removal reveals that WordPress governance has always been, and will remain, a single person's call.
A client forwarded the Fortune story on a Monday morning with a two-word message: “Should we worry?” The short answer is: not about the platform, and not in the way the headline suggests. But something did become undeniably clear last month, and clients who run on WordPress deserve a plain account of it.
In late September 2026, the six-member Automattic board voted to place CEO Matt Mullenweg on leave, installing CFO Mark Davies as interim CEO. Thirty-three hours and twenty minutes later, Mullenweg was back. He holds 84% of Automattic’s voting control. He used it to void the board’s decision, then fired Davies, the chief legal officer, and others involved in the vote. Toni Schneider — founding Automattic CEO and now CEO of Bluesky — resigned from the board. Fortune published a detailed reconstruction on October 19, 2026. As of that date, no one has publicly explained what prompted the board to act in the first place.
Automattic is the steward of WordPress core, WordPress.org, and the ACF plugin that much of our client work is built on. That context matters for how to read this story. The platform itself did not change. The codebase is the same. The plugins are the same. What the episode made concrete is something that was always structurally true: there is no board-level check on Mullenweg’s decisions about core, about plugins, about disputes with hosts or the broader ecosystem. The board tried once and was undone in a day and a half.
There is no board check on Mullenweg’s decisions about WordPress core, plugins, or the WP Engine dispute. The board tried once and was undone in a day and a half.
For organizations where platform governance is a procurement or compliance question — a public broadcaster, a large university, a health system — this is a material factor that belongs in the honest version of the CMS evaluation. Not as a reason to reject WordPress, which remains technically excellent and community-supported at a scale no alternative matches. But as a clear-eyed understanding of the structure: governance is one person, and nothing about this episode suggests that will change.
Our position is what it has been. We build on WordPress because the platform earns it on its merits. We follow the WP Engine dispute, the ACF situation, and now this boardroom episode because our clients need a studio that reads the room, not one that issues reassurances. The code that ran your site last week runs it this week. What we know now is simply that the person who decides what happens next has fewer constraints than anyone thought.