WordPress Co-Founder Expresses Succession Plan

WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has sole possession and control of the open source project, domain, and website wordpress.org. After ignoring questions about a succession plan or project governance for years, Matt expressed he and anyone he grants access are in charge and WordPress community rules and guidelines do not apply.

After sharing a San Francisco crowdfunding link on a WordPress social media account in January of 2024, Mullenweg addressed critics saying, “My understanding is the rules are for members of the marketing team who post to social on behalf of WP through Sprout Social. I have direct and root access to the account (and everything on [wordpress.org]) because I started it. I delegated access to the account to the marketing team, and delegated making rules that they could use to post to it. I did not ask for the marketing team to dictate what I or other people with direct, non-delegated access to the account can do.”

If Mullenweg gets hit by a bus, whoever has or can get the passwords is in charge of the directory that serves critical updates to plugins and themes running on 40% of all websites.

Mullenweg Personally Owns wordpress.org

Mullenweg Prevents Millions of Sites from Receiving Updates

In September 2024, Mullenweg banned any website hosted with WP Engine from receiving those updates a few days after describing the company as a “cancer to WordPress” before his keynote Q&A session at WordCamp US 2024. WP Engine is a direct competitor to Automattic where Matt Mullenweg is the founder and CEO. The companies exchanged these cease & desist letters:

• WP Engine Cease & Desist
• Automattic Cease & Desist

Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of WordPress, learned about the WP Engine ban in real time along with the rest of the community.

Mullenweg is the Director of the WordPress Foundation

The only published piece of the foundation’s charter is the About page on its website. There is no public roster of the foundation’s members. Chomphosy is identified as the Community Steward.

Foundation Website Users

As of September 2024, the following people have user accounts on the foundation’s website.

1. Aditya Kane
2. Andrea Middleton
3. Angela Jin
4. Anjana Vasan
5. Cate DeRosia
6. Cheri Lucas
7. Erica Varlese
8. Hari Shanker
9. Harmony Romo
10. Hugh Lashbrooke
11. Jen Mylo
12. Jordan Gillman
13. Josepha Haden Chomphosy
14. Julia Golomb
15. Mark Uraine
16. Matt Mullenweg
17. Rose Goldman
18. Reyes Martinez
19. Yogesh Londhe

I do not have evidence this list of people are the foundation’s members, because no public roster of the foundation’s members is available. The foundation’s charter is also unlikely to contain any mechanism to exert control over or changes to wordpress.org.