Automattic’s interim CEO and legal chief signed reciprocal severance deals during Mullenweg’s brief ouster
Last week, on September 9, Automattic’s board voted to put CEO Matt Mullenweg on paid leave, a decision the board still hasn’t explained publicly. Mullenweg, in a company-wide Slack message, accused CFO Mark Davies of “conspiring” with three board members behind his back to force the vote through, saying he was given only 50 minutes’ notice and was denied time to have the resolution reviewed by outside legal counsel. He returned to the role roughly 33 hours later, and the same board members who voted him out have since departed the company themselves.
- ▪Last week, on September 9, Automattic’s board voted to put CEO Matt Mullenweg on paid leave, a decision the board still hasn’t explained publicly.
- ▪Mullenweg, in a company-wide Slack message, accused CFO Mark Davies of “conspiring” with three board members behind his back to force the vote through, saying he was given only 50 minutes’ notice and was denied time to have the resolution r
- ▪He returned to the role roughly 33 hours later, and the same board members who voted him out have since departed the company themselves.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/16/automattics-interim-ceo-and-legal-chief-signed-reciprocal-severance-deals-during-mullenwegs-brief-ouster/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:35:29 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-16T19:38:41.620Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-16T19:38:41.620Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | eGWUmc_GE1vp · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Last week, on September 9, Automattic’s board voted to put CEO Matt Mullenweg on paid leave, a decision the board still hasn’t explained publicly. Mullenweg, in a company-wide Slack message, accused CFO Mark Davies of “conspiring” with three board members behind his back to force the vote through, saying he was given only 50 minutes’ notice and was denied time to have the resolution reviewed by outside legal counsel. He returned to the role roughly 33 hours later, and the same board members who voted him out have since departed the company themselves. In the 33-hour window between Mullenweg being put on leave and his return, two key executives at the company signed off on generous exit packages for each other.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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