Mullenweg had accused the company board of conspiring against him to place him on paid leave.

For reasons unknown to the public, the founder and CEO of Automattic Matt Mullenweg was briefly ousted from his position last week. He was reinstated a few days later.

Last Wednesday (9 September), Mullenweg posted to a company-wide Slack channel that Automattic’s chief financial officer Mark Davies had “conspired” with other board members, including founding CEO Toni Schneider (who is the current CEO of Bluesky), to put him on a paid leave of absence.

The board voted Davies as interim CEO and told publications that it had full confidence that he would be able to “execute against the company’s priorities”.

However, by Friday (11 September), Mullenweg seemed to be back in his position, according to newer Slack messages verified by company employees.

“A lot happened in the past 48 hours that we need to sort out, and I hope much of it was a misunderstanding, because I have huge respect and regard for those involved,” he wrote on Slack.

And in a statement, Automattic confirmed with the media that Mullenweg is back as the chairperson and CEO of his company “with full support of the board”.

“If you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well”, the spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Mullenweg, according to his posts on X, seems to be taking his brief ousting in stride. Last Friday, in a series of posts, he seemingly joked that this was the fifth attempt at a coup in his company.

“Founder advice: If you don’t have a coup attempt every few years, you’re not hiring strong enough leaders,” he said.

In a separate post, he wrote, “Boards are never boring,” with a ‘laughing-crying’ emoji accompanying the statement.

Automattic is best known as the creator behind WordPress.com. It also owns the microblogging platform Tumblr, WooCommerce – a plugin for WordPress – and the online survey and quiz conductor CrowdSignal, formerly known as PollDaddy.

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