Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg Claims He’s Back 'In Control'
Less than 48 hours after announcing he was forcibly placed on a leave of absence by the Automattic board on Wednesday, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg posted in a company-wide Slack channel claiming that he’s back “in control” of the company. 💡Have something to share? Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. “Happy to announce the board is back in agreement, and I'm in control of Automattic,” Mullenweg wrote in the company-wide Announcements channel on Slack.
- ▪Less than 48 hours after announcing he was forcibly placed on a leave of absence by the Automattic board on Wednesday, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg posted in a company-wide Slack channel claiming that he’s back “in control” of the company. �
- ▪Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404.
- ▪“Happy to announce the board is back in agreement, and I'm in control of Automattic,” Mullenweg wrote in the company-wide Announcements channel on Slack.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 4 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
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| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/automattic-matt-mullenweg-back-in-control/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:33:12 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-11T18:53:48.321Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-11T18:54:06.500Z |
| 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 | 3GHwKjdTozMm · 2 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
Less than 48 hours after announcing he was forcibly placed on a leave of absence by the Automattic board on Wednesday, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg posted in a company-wide Slack channel claiming that he’s back “in control” of the company. 💡Have something to share? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected] to Slack screenshots viewed by 404 Media, late Thursday evening Mullenweg posted “Don’t call it a comeback” and linked to LL Cool J’s music video for “Mama Said Knock You Out.” Mullenweg’s Slack profile picture currently shows him wearing a pirate hat and eyepatch.TechCrunch first reported Mullenweg’s comments about being back in control.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
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