Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he’s back in control after CEO ouster
Matt Mullenweg has posted a message to Automattic’s Slack, claiming he is back in control as CEO of the WordPress.com parent company, according to a screenshot of the message seen by TechCrunch, which was confirmed by two sources. The post arrives only days after Automattic’s board voted to oust Mullenweg as CEO for unknown reasons. Automattic has been asked to confirm if Mullenweg’s statement is true, but has not yet responded to a request for comment.
- ▪Matt Mullenweg has posted a message to Automattic’s Slack, claiming he is back in control as CEO of the WordPress.com parent company, according to a screenshot of the message seen by TechCrunch, which was confirmed by two sources.
- ▪The post arrives only days after Automattic’s board voted to oust Mullenweg as CEO for unknown reasons.
- ▪Automattic has been asked to confirm if Mullenweg’s statement is true, but has not yet responded to a request for comment.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 4 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: lean left. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
TechCrunch files mainly under tech. We currently carry 794 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/11/matt-mullenweg-tells-automattic-staff-in-slack-hes-back-in-control-after-ceo-ouster/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:19:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-11T15:22:50.976Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-11T15:22:50.976Z |
| 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 |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| 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
Matt Mullenweg has posted a message to Automattic’s Slack, claiming he is back in control as CEO of the WordPress.com parent company, according to a screenshot of the message seen by TechCrunch, which was confirmed by two sources. The post arrives only days after Automattic’s board voted to oust Mullenweg as CEO for unknown reasons. Automattic has been asked to confirm if Mullenweg’s statement is true, but has not yet responded to a request for comment. Mullenweg responded to our inquiry, saying a blog post is forthcoming. This story is still developing. On Wednesday, the WordPress founder and a key advocate for the open source community told his team via Slack that Automattic’s board members had “conspired” behind his back by voting to put him on a paid leave of absence.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from TechCrunch
