Person
Co-creator of the WordPress publishing software and co-founder/CEO of Automattic, where he leads the WordPress open-source project and controls WordPress.org.
Automattic put Matt Mullenweg on paid leave on Wednesday and made its CFO interim CEO. Two days later Mullenweg told staff on Slack that the board is back in agreement, and no board member has confirmed it.
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Dartmouth and Lancaster researchers tie 88 non-consensual deepfake sites to five mainstream web providers led by Cloudflare, Google and Namecheap. The sites surfaced in keyword searches and every provider already bans illegal use, so the gap the study points to is enforcement.
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Matt Mullenweg's 84% vote returned him to control of Automattic 33 hours after its board put him on leave. For businesses on WordPress.com, WooCommerce or Tumblr, that vote is the governance they are buying into, whoever he names to the board.
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Matt Mullenweg has named four new Automattic directors weeks after the old board's leave vote against him lasted 33 hours and 20 minutes. He controls 84% of the voting power, so the people who oversee him are people he chose.
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The reciprocal deals, effective September 10, would cost Automattic $8.15 million now that Matt Mullenweg has fired both men. The company's new lawyers are deciding whether to pay out or contest the documents.
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Matt Mullenweg went on leave last Thursday and was back by Saturday, with CFO Mark Davies standing in between the two notices. The company timed the absence to the minute and has declined to explain what changed.
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Automattic's board put Matt Mullenweg on leave on 9 September and he was back inside 33 hours; the two mutual severance agreements that took effect in that window carry an estimated $8.15M and a for-cause escape route.
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A board resolution made Automattic's CFO interim chief executive on Wednesday. A spokesperson's sentence to TechCrunch on Saturday put Matt Mullenweg back in the title, and Automattic has not described what authority Mark Davies retains.
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Matt Mullenweg told Automattic's company-wide Announcements channel that the board is back in agreement and he is in control. By Friday the CFO named acting interim CEO no longer had a working Slack account.
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Automattic's directors put Matt Mullenweg on paid leave and handed the CEO job to their CFO. The plugin directory and the trademark that WordPress sites depend on are still his, held personally outside the company.
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Directors named the finance chief interim CEO on September 9 and left the open-source project's distribution servers under Mullenweg's personal control, while the WP Engine suit still names him alongside the company.
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