Thoughts on Automattic and WordPress:  🔗 **Source:** [Thoughts on Automattic and WordPress:](https://twitter.com/trentlapinski/status/2098884684596081052/?rw_tt_thread=True) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: > - automattic > - wordpress-governance > - wp-engine-lawsuit > - open-source-governance > - corporate-governance > author: Trent Lapinski (trentlapinski) > source: https://twitter.com/trentlapinski/status/2098884684596081052/?rw_tt_thread=True > reference: https://twitter.com/trentlapinski/status/2098884684596081052/?rw_tt_thread=True > date created: 2026-09-13 > > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## 🏷️ Title **Thoughts on Automattic and WordPress** — a two-part X/Twitter thread by Trent Lapinski, posted in the days after Automattic's board voted to place CEO Matt Mullenweg on leave (naming CFO Mark Davies interim CEO) and Mullenweg's return to the CEO seat shortly afterward. Part one is a long-form prose forecast; part two is the same argument restated as bullet points because, in the author's words, there is no TL;DR. ## 🧭 Table of Contents 1. 🔗 References (in-page) 2. 📝 Summary 3. 📖 Main Content and Notes 4. 📚 References 5. 🗣️ Paraphrase 6. 📰 Newsletter 7. ✅ Action Items 8. 🧪 Hypotheses 9. 📊 Methodology 10. ❓ Questions 11. 🔮 Future Research 12. 💡 Implications 13. 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment 14. 📊 Accessibility Assessment 15. 🌍 DEIB Assessment 16. ✅ Logical Validity 17. 🛡️ DARVO Analysis 18. 🎯 Conclusion 19. 🧱 Refactor Appendix ## 🔗 References (in-page) The captured body contains **no hyperlinks**. Every factual claim in the thread (the 83% markdown, the BlackRock mark, the trial resuming at month end, the CFO firing, the board reshuffle mechanics) is asserted without a citation. The only external reference the author gestures at is "BlackRock's latest mark is the public datapoint people are citing," which is itself unlinked. Treat the thread as opinion and forecast, not reporting. ## 📝 Summary **What happened.** Automattic's board placed Matt Mullenweg on leave and installed CFO Mark Davies as interim CEO. Mullenweg publicly said the board "conspired" and that he voted no. Within days he was back as CEO. The author infers (explicitly labeling it a guess in places) that Mullenweg reconstituted the board, held an emergency meeting, removed the sitting directors, seated a friendlier board, and reversed the leave decision. **Why it matters.** If that inference is right, the author argues the ousted directors — who represent significant shareholders — retain standing to sue for breach of fiduciary duty or to seek an injunction. That, layered on top of the ongoing WP Engine litigation, an 83% valuation markdown over five years, and the loss of the CFO, would cut Automattic off from new venture capital and put payroll at risk. For WordPress the project, the author's forecast is fewer developers, less money, and weaker leadership at precisely the moment the project needs to reinvent itself for an "agentic" web. **Stakeholders.** Automattic employees and leadership; Automattic's investors (the thread names VC firms, BlackRock, and Salesforce); WP Engine and its customers; the WordPress open source project and its contributor teams; hosts and agencies whose businesses depend on project stability; the independent governance efforts that have formed since the 2024 dispute (FAIR, The WP Open Community Collective). **Risks flagged by the author.** Shareholder class action; injunction removing Mullenweg again; adverse WP Engine verdict with multi-million-dollar penalties; the author's speculation about criminal extortion exposure (which the author himself labels "an allegation/prediction, not a charge"); VC blacklisting; missed payroll and layoffs; strategic paralysis on AI. **Bottom line.** A pessimistic but internally consistent forecast from a long-time open web contributor who closes by saying he takes no pride in it. The chain of reasoning is plausible at each link but compounds unverified assumptions, and several of the strongest claims (revenue "really bad," "won't be making payroll," "WP Engine likely wins") are stated with more confidence than the evidence in the thread supports. Useful as a map of the downside scenario, not as a set of facts. ## 📖 Main Content The thread runs in two passes. **Pass one (prose)** opens with the conditional mechanics of Mullenweg's return: board-stacking, an emergency meeting, dismissal of the sitting board, appointment of a new one, reinstatement, and dismissal of the interim CEO. It then pivots to the financial picture (83% decline in five years), the WP Engine trial calendar, a guess at the board's motive (get Mullenweg out of the seat before trial and possibly settle), the litigation exposure that follows from firing directors who represent large shareholders, the capital-markets consequence (blacklisted from VC), and a menu of endgames: a down-round buyout by a new investor, a recapitalization that only happens if Mullenweg leaves, or a scorched-earth skeleton-crew survival plan. The final third turns to WordPress itself: less capacity, AI eroding the business, and an argument that WordPress must become part of an agentic stack rather than a passive data store, which the author believes no one is positioned to drive. It closes on a personal note of grief about the open web and a wish that open source governance had been solved. **Pass two (bullets)** restates the same content under headings (the board move, money and investors, if Matt stays CEO, WP Engine lawsuit, what this means for WordPress, the closer). Notably, the bullet version adds hedges the prose version lacks: "just speculation," "Guess as to why the board moved," "That is an allegation/prediction, not a charge," "in this view." ### 🗒️ Notes - The two passes are not identical in confidence. Read the bullets as the author's more careful statement of the same position. - The mechanism described (emergency meeting, removal, reconstitution) is the author's reconstruction; the thread does not cite board minutes, a filing, or a statement from Automattic. Verify against Automattic's own announcements before repeating it. - The 83% figure appears to derive from a single fund's private-market mark, not from an audited valuation or a transaction. Fund marks move on comps and discount rates as well as on company performance. - The "blacklisted from VC" claim is a reasonable heuristic about investor behavior during active shareholder litigation, but the author presents it as a certainty. - The agentic-stack argument is the one forward-looking, constructive claim in the thread and the one most relevant to WordPress contributor teams regardless of how the corporate story resolves. It intersects directly with the Core AI team's mandate, the Abilities API, and the MCP adapter work already underway in the project. - The closing paragraph is the emotional center of the thread and the reason it circulated: an insider's grief rather than a rival's gloat. ## 📚 References Primary sources the reader should consult to check the thread's claims (none are linked in the source itself): - The source thread: https://twitter.com/trentlapinski/status/2098884684596081052/?rw_tt_thread=True - Automattic's newsroom and leadership announcements: https://automattic.com/ - *WP Engine, Inc. v. Automattic Inc. and Matthew Mullenweg*, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Case No. 3:24-cv-06917 (filed October 2024). Docket available via PACER or CourtListener; search by case number. - WP Engine's public statements on the dispute: https://wpengine.com/ - WordPress.org project news and Make WordPress team blogs, for any official project response: https://wordpress.org/news/ and https://make.wordpress.org/ - BlackRock fund holdings disclosures (the private-market mark the author references is reported in fund semi-annual and annual reports; verify the specific fund and date before citing a percentage). - FAIR Package Manager (federated, independent WordPress distribution): https://fair.pm/ - The WP Open Community Collective (The WPOCC) — the contributor-led governance effort; verify current URL before citing. ## 🗣️ Paraphrase 1. *Board mechanics.* If Mullenweg regained the CEO title by packing the board, convening an emergency meeting, firing the directors, and seating a new board to reinstate him and dismiss the interim CEO, he has exposed himself to a shareholder class action. 2. *Standing.* The ousted directors represented major shareholders and still have legal standing; they could seek a court injunction to remove him again. 3. *Valuation.* Automattic's value has fallen roughly 83% in five years, which the author reads as evidence of severe revenue problems. 4. *WP Engine trial.* The case resumes at month end. The author believes the facts favor WP Engine, that penalties could reach millions, and that a referral for criminal extortion charges is conceivable. 5. *Board motive.* The author speculates the board wanted Mullenweg out of the seat before trial so the company could settle; the two sides clearly disagree on litigation strategy. 6. *Litigation cascade.* Former directors and insiders will sue for breach of fiduciary duty and negligence. The shareholder side includes large VC firms, BlackRock, and Salesforce. The company will be unable to raise venture money while this plays out. 7. *Endgames.* Mullenweg's options are a down-round buyout by a new investor (if existing investors will sell, which they may refuse out of spite), or relying on declining revenue with no CFO — which the author says leads to missed payroll and layoffs. 8. *Realistic bailout.* The most plausible rescue is Mullenweg stepping down so a new executive team can ask existing investors to recapitalize; those investors will not do so while he remains. 9. *If he stays.* Settle with WP Engine or lose and absorb the penalty; cut to a skeleton crew; hoard cash; fight well-funded investor lawyers who can bleed the company in fees. 10. *WordPress consequences.* Fewer developers, less money, weaker leadership while AI erodes the business. 11. *Agentic pivot.* WordPress's long-term survival depends on becoming part of the agentic AI stack, not just a data store. No one is positioned to drive that change, and the author believes Mullenweg would block it as incompatible with twenty years of legacy. 12. *The closer.* The author takes no pleasure in this forecast, sees it as the destabilization of an open web he spent years building, and wishes open source governance had been solved so that one person or one company fight could not do this. ## 📰 Newsletter **The week Automattic's board blinked, and then un-blinked** If you stepped away from WordPress Twitter for a long weekend, here is what you missed: Automattic's board voted to put Matt Mullenweg on leave and hand the interim CEO badge to CFO Mark Davies. Matt said the board "conspired." A few days later Matt was CEO again and the board looked rather different. Nobody outside the room has published the minutes. Into that vacuum stepped Trent Lapinski, a long-time open web builder, with a thread that reads like a corporate-governance thriller written by someone who has seen the ending before: shareholder suits, injunctions, VC blacklists, skeleton crews, and a wistful closing paragraph about how we never fixed open source governance. Read it: https://twitter.com/trentlapinski/status/2098884684596081052/?rw_tt_thread=True **Our take.** The thread's logic is tight at each step and loose across the whole chain. The 83% valuation markdown is a real public datapoint, but a fund's private mark is not an income statement. "Likely wins" is a prediction about a trial that has not happened. And "won't be making payroll" is a forecast built on a CFO firing, not on a cash-flow statement. Treat the thread as the bear case, well argued. **What actually matters for contributors.** Buried in the doom is the one claim every Make team should take seriously: WordPress has to be a first-class participant in the agentic web, not a database with a login page. The Core AI team, the Abilities API, and the MCP adapter are already pointed there. If Automattic's contribution capacity does shrink, the question is whether the rest of the ecosystem — hosts, agencies, FAIR, The WP Open Community Collective — picks up that work or lets it stall. Docs and links: https://make.wordpress.org/ai/ and https://fair.pm/ **Reading list.** WP Engine v. Automattic docket (N.D. Cal. 3:24-cv-06917); Automattic's newsroom for whatever they eventually say; and, for balance, anything written by someone who has actually seen a cap table. ## ✅ Action Items ### DevRel - Prepare a neutral, fact-only FAQ on "what changed at Automattic and what did not change in WordPress core" for community managers to share; refresh it as official statements land. - Monitor sentiment on X, Mastodon, Reddit r/WordPress, and Post Status Slack for contributor anxiety; route concrete questions to the relevant Make teams. ### OSPO - Inventory which WordPress core components and infrastructure are staffed primarily by Automattic-sponsored contributors; model the bus factor if that sponsorship contracts by 25%, 50%, 75%. - Draft a one-page brief for leadership on the difference between Automattic corporate risk and WordPress project risk, so budget decisions are not made on the wrong signal. ### Community - Re-share the existing Five for the Future and contributor-onboarding paths; the thread's forecast of "fewer developers" is only true if no one else steps in. - Coordinate with The WP Open Community Collective on a joint statement of continuity if the situation escalates. ### WordPress subteams - **Core:** Document release-management succession and who holds deploy and signing credentials; confirm none are single-person dependencies. - **Core Performance:** No direct action; note that performance work is heavily host-sponsored and less exposed to Automattic staffing shifts. - **Core AI:** The thread's agentic-stack argument is your roadmap in a hostile frame. Publish a short public status of the Abilities API, MCP adapter, and PHP AI Client so the community sees the work exists. - **Core Program Team:** Prepare a contingency schedule for the next major release that assumes reduced Automattic sponsorship. - **Mobile:** Assess dependency on Automattic-employed maintainers for the iOS and Android apps. - **Playground:** Assess the same; Playground is disproportionately Automattic-staffed. - **Community:** See above; also confirm WordCamp Central financial operations are insulated from Automattic corporate events. - **Training:** Add a Learn WordPress lesson on project governance and how decisions are made, written neutrally. - **Marketing:** Do not amplify the thread; do prepare accurate talking points. - **Support:** Expect an uptick in "is WordPress dying" forum threads; pin a calm, factual response. - **Design, Documentation, Photos, TV, Polyglots, Accessibility, Meta, CLI, Themes, Plugins:** Identify Automattic-sponsored team reps and confirm each team has at least one non-Automattic rep with admin access to team tooling. - **Hosting:** Convene host representatives on shared contribution commitments if Automattic capacity drops. - **Tide:** Not applicable to this source; no team-specific exposure identified. - **Openverse:** Openverse infrastructure is Automattic-funded; verify continuity plans. ### The WPOCC - Use this moment to publish, in plain language, what The WP Open Community Collective's governance model would have done differently in this scenario. The thread's closer is an open invitation. ### FAIR - Publish current adoption numbers and a mirror-status page; if trust in a single-vendor distribution channel is shaken, FAIR's value proposition is the answer to the thread's "what this means for WordPress" section. ## 🧪 Hypotheses 1. **H1 — Board reconstitution occurred as described.** Testable: Automattic's corporate filings, board roster changes, or a formal statement will confirm or refute an emergency board removal within the relevant window. 2. **H2 — Shareholder litigation follows within 90 days.** Testable: a derivative or class action naming Mullenweg and Automattic is filed in Delaware Chancery or N.D. Cal. by mid-December 2026. 3. **H3 — Valuation markdown reflects revenue decline rather than comp compression.** Testable: any disclosed revenue figure (leaks, filings, credible reporting) shows a year-over-year decline of more than 20%; if revenue is flat or growing, the author's inference fails. 4. **H4 — Automattic's core contribution headcount drops materially.** Testable: count of Automattic-attributed props in WordPress core commits and Trac tickets over the next two releases falls by more than 30% versus the prior two. 5. **H5 — WP Engine prevails at trial.** Testable: verdict or settlement terms in the N.D. Cal. case. 6. **H6 — Agentic capability ships regardless of corporate turmoil.** Testable: the Abilities API and MCP adapter reach a stable release in WordPress core within the next two major versions. ## 📊 Methodology The author's method is inference from public signals: a leaked or reported board action, a single fund's valuation mark, the litigation calendar, and a personnel change (CFO). He builds a causal chain forward from those signals using general knowledge of corporate governance and venture behavior. There is no primary-source citation, no interview, no financial document, and no counter-scenario. The bullet restatement adds explicit hedges, which is good practice, but the prose version is the one most people read and quote. This analysis treated the thread as a single document, read both passes, cross-checked them for changes in confidence, identified the claims that carry the argument, and flagged the reasoning steps where the conclusion outruns the evidence. Fallacy identification followed the standard approach of naming the pattern, locating the passage, explaining the gap, and proposing a repair. ## ❓ Questions - What actually happened at the board level? Was there a formal removal, resignations, or a negotiated return? - Who are the current directors and which shareholders do they represent? - What does Automattic's actual revenue trend look like? Is the 83% mark a company-specific signal or a sector-wide private-market repricing? - Was the CFO firing a consequence of the board vote or a cause of it? - What is the current procedural posture of WP Engine v. Automattic, and is a trial date actually set for this month? - Which WordPress core and infrastructure functions would be affected first if Automattic's sponsored-contributor headcount fell? - Does the author have a stake, past or present, in any party to the dispute? ## 🔮 Future Research - Build a public, maintained "who funds what" map of WordPress contributor teams so the ecosystem can model corporate shocks quickly. - Compare this episode to prior founder-versus-board conflicts (OpenAI November 2023, Uber 2017) for what the recovery path looked like and how long capital stayed away. - Study how other single-vendor-dominated open source projects (Elastic, HashiCorp, Redis) handled governance shocks and whether forks or foundations stabilized them. - Track Automattic-attributed core commits per release as a leading indicator. ## 💡 Implications **Practice.** Agencies and hosts should not change platforms on the strength of a thread, but they should audit their exposure to single-vendor services (WordPress.com-hosted infrastructure, Jetpack, Akismet, WooCommerce updates) and confirm fallback paths such as FAIR mirrors. **Policy.** The thread's closing wish — that open source governance had been solved — is the policy question. Projects with a single controlling individual and a co-located commercial entity carry a structural risk that no code of conduct addresses. Foundations, independent boards, and multi-vendor distribution channels are the known mitigations. **Security.** If contributor capacity shrinks, security-release cadence is the first thing to watch. The Security team's composition and whether it is single-vendor dependent should be public knowledge. **Education.** Learn WordPress and community onboarding should teach how the project is governed, not just how to contribute code, so that contributors understand the stakes. **Funding.** Hosts and large agencies are the only actors with both the money and the incentive to backfill Automattic capacity. Five for the Future needs a mechanism for pooled or matched commitments, and independent governance bodies need a funding story that does not route through any single company. ## 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment - **Visual:** Weak. No diagrams, images, or timelines; the board-reshuffle sequence would benefit from a simple flowchart. - **Aural:** Not applicable; text only. Reads well aloud because the prose is short-sentenced. - **Verbal:** Strong. The argument is entirely verbal and the bullet restatement makes it skimmable. - **Kinesthetic:** Weak. No exercises or actions for the reader. - **Logical:** Moderate. The chain-of-consequences structure appeals to logical readers, but the unstated premises will frustrate careful ones. - **Social:** Moderate. Written for a public feed; invites replies and quote-tweets. - **Solitary:** Strong. A reflective piece suited to individual reading. - **Naturalistic:** Not applicable. - **Reading level:** Roughly grade 10 to 12. Sentences are mostly short but the vocabulary (fiduciary duty, injunction, down round, recap) assumes familiarity with corporate finance and law. ## 📊 Accessibility Assessment Mapped to WCAG 2.2 AA as applied to a text-only social post. 1. **Perceivable (1.1 Text alternatives):** No images, so no alt-text gap. Pass. 2. **Perceivable (1.3 Adaptable):** The bullet section uses the "•" character rather than semantic list markup; screen readers will read it as text, not a list. Partial. 3. **Perceivable (1.4 Distinguishable):** Plain text inherits platform contrast; no color-dependent meaning. Pass. 4. **Operable (2.4 Navigable):** The bullet pass adds informal headings ("Money and investors," "If Matt stays CEO") that aid navigation but are not semantic headings. Partial. 5. **Understandable (3.1 Readable):** Jargon (fiduciary duty, down round, injunction) is undefined. Partial; a one-line gloss would fix it. 6. **Understandable (3.2 Predictable):** Consistent structure across both passes. Pass. 7. **Robust (4.1 Compatible):** Depends entirely on the X platform; no author control. Not assessable. ## 🌍 DEIB Assessment - **Cultural breadth:** Narrow. The frame is U.S. corporate law, U.S. venture capital, and a U.S. federal case; WordPress's majority non-U.S. contributor base is not considered. - **Inclusive language:** Mostly neutral. "Investor stupid enough" is a gratuitous insult; "shitty feeling" is informal but self-directed. - **Neurodiversity support:** The bullet restatement is a genuine accessibility gain for readers who struggle with long prose blocks. Credit to the author for producing it. - **Representation:** The thread names only executives and institutions. Contributors, translators, support volunteers, and non-Automattic maintainers — the people most affected by "fewer developers" — are invisible. - **Psychological safety:** The closing paragraph models vulnerability and is likely to make anxious contributors feel seen rather than mocked. The middle sections, by contrast, may heighten anxiety without offering any agency to the reader. ## ✅ Logical Validity **Strong reasoning.** - The standing argument (removed directors who represent major shareholders retain the ability to litigate) is sound as a general matter of corporate law. - The observation that investors will not recapitalize a company while suing its CEO is a reasonable behavioral inference. - The agentic-stack argument correctly identifies that a CMS's future value lies in being a participant in AI workflows rather than a passive store, and the thread is honest that this is a strategic opinion. - The author's bullet restatement adds hedges ("just speculation," "allegation/prediction, not a charge") that improve the argument's honesty. **Fallacies.** 1. **Non sequitur (valuation to revenue).** *Located:* "Automattic has declined in value 83% in 5 years. Their revenue is likely bad, like really bad for such a decline to happen." *Explanation:* A private-market fund mark reflects comparable-company multiples, discount rates, liquidity discounts, and litigation risk as well as revenue. An 83% markdown is consistent with flat revenue in a sector whose multiples compressed sharply since 2021. *Fix:* "An 83% markdown is a strong negative signal; it could reflect revenue decline, multiple compression, litigation overhang, or all three. Without revenue data we cannot say which." 2. **Slippery slope (CFO firing to missed payroll).** *Located:* "If Matt cannot find another investor all he has left is the companies revenue which is in major decline but he just fired the CFO. There's a good chance they won't be making payroll sooner rather than later. Which means more layoffs." *Explanation:* Each step (no new investor, declining revenue, no CFO, missed payroll, layoffs) is presented as following from the previous with no probability attached, and the intermediate premise (revenue "in major decline") was itself inferred, not shown. A company can operate on existing cash for years without a CFO or new capital. *Fix:* "Without new capital, runway depends on current cash and burn, neither of which is public. If both are weak, layoffs are the likely lever." 3. **False dilemma (the "only hope" framings).** *Located:* "Matt's only hope at this point is to find an investor stupid enough to buy out the other investors in a down round. If they're even willing to sell. The other investors might prefer to sue and not sell just to stick it to Matt." (Also: "Matt's likely only choice if he is able to remain as CEO is either settle with WP Engine and take the financial hit, or just lose and take the hit.") *Explanation:* Other paths exist and are common in founder-board disputes: negotiated settlement with the ousted directors, a governance agreement that adds independent directors, a partial secondary sale, debt financing, or a strategic acquisition. The thread excludes them to sharpen the narrative. *Fix:* "The cleanest paths are a down-round buyout or a recapitalization on the condition he steps down; messier but plausible paths include a negotiated governance settlement or a strategic sale." **Tone of voice.** Confident, forecasting, occasionally sardonic ("stupid enough," "stick it to Matt"), then abruptly elegiac in the closer. The shift from prosecutor to mourner is what gives the thread its emotional credibility, and also why readers may absorb the speculative middle as if it carried the same weight as the sincere ending. ## 🛡️ DARVO Analysis DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse victim and offender) describes a defensive rhetorical move by someone accused of wrongdoing. The author of this thread is not an accused party, so the pattern does not apply to his own rhetoric. - **Deny:** Not present. The author makes no denials; he is not defending himself. - **Attack:** Mild. "Investor stupid enough" and "stick it to Matt" are jabs, but they are not deployed to deflect an accusation against the author. - **Reverse victim-offender:** Not present in the author's voice. The thread does relay a second-hand claim — that Mullenweg said the board "conspired" — which, if accurate, is a statement worth examining for reversal (the person the board acted against framing the board as the wrongdoer). That is the reported speech of a third party, not something the author asserts, and it cannot be evaluated from this source alone. Conclusion: no DARVO pattern in the source text. Flag the relayed "conspired" claim for evaluation only if a primary source for it is found. ## 🎯 Conclusion **Bottom line.** This thread is the best-articulated bear case for Automattic in the days after the board episode, written by someone who plainly cares about the outcome. Its individual legal and financial observations are mostly sound; its overall forecast compounds three reasoning gaps (valuation-to-revenue, CFO-to-payroll, and "only hope" framings) into a certainty the evidence does not support. Its most durable contribution is not the doom but the strategic claim: WordPress must become an agentic participant, and the ecosystem must be able to drive that whether or not any one company can. **Next steps.** 1. Verify the board mechanics against Automattic's own statements before repeating any of it. 2. Track the three testable hypotheses that resolve soonest: shareholder litigation filed (H2), WP Engine trial outcome (H5), and Automattic-attributed core commits over the next two releases (H4). 3. Use the thread's agentic-stack argument as a prompt for a public Core AI status update. 4. Route the governance question to The WP Open Community Collective and FAIR, which exist to answer it. ## 🧱 Refactor Appendix ### Literature Split Pad ### Atom h1 — The board mechanics and their legal exposure > [!quote] > To get his CEO title back, if Matt stacked the board, held an emergency board meeting fired everyone then appointed a new board to reinstate him as CEO and fire the interim CEO then he now risks a shareholder class action lawsuit. #atom/literature/h1 ### Atom h2 — The agentic-stack thesis > [!quote] > As the Internet moves towards becoming an agentic AI Internet, WordPress's only hope is to become an agentic system. Merely using WordPress as a data store is not enough. It has to pivot to become part of the agentic stack but there's really no one to drive such a radical change to the project and Matt would never allow it as it breaks 20 years of legacy development. #atom/literature/h2 ### Atom h3 — The closer > [!quote] > I take no pride in this, as it means the destruction of the open web as we know it. Something I contributed many years of my life to building is now being destabilized and destroyed. It's a shitty feeling, and I wish we had solved open source governance more effectively so this never could have happened. #atom/literature/h3 ### Atomic Split Pad #### Zettel z1 — Corporate risk is not project risk, but they share a staffing pipe Automattic's legal and financial exposure only becomes WordPress's exposure through one channel: sponsored contributor hours. Modeling that channel (who, how many, on which components) converts vague dread into a plannable contingency. #atom/zettel/z1 #### Zettel z2 — A fund mark is not an income statement Private-market valuation changes bundle revenue, multiples, liquidity, and risk overhang. Any argument that reads revenue off a markdown needs a second data point. #atom/zettel/z2 #### Zettel z3 — Governance debt compounds like technical debt The author's closing wish is a statement about deferred governance work. Every year a project runs on a single controlling individual, the cost of a shock rises. FAIR and The WPOCC are attempts to pay that debt down. #atom/zettel/z3 ### Fleeting Queue - Ask: does anyone maintain a public list of Automattic-sponsored team reps across Make teams? If not, start one. #atom/fleeting/f1 - Compare this thread's forecast to what actually happens at the 30-, 90-, and 180-day marks; write up the scorecard. #atom/fleeting/f2 - The bullet-restatement pattern (prose then bullets with added hedges) is a good template for contentious posts; borrow it. #atom/fleeting/f3 <!-- deep-read:sections end --> 📄 **Full text:** [[Full Document Contents/Tweets/Thoughts on Automattic and WordPress-2.md|Thoughts on Automattic and WordPress: by Trent]] ## Highlights - To get his CEO title back, if Matt stacked the board, held an emergency board meeting fired everyone then appointed a new board to reinstate him as CEO and fire the interim CEO then he now risks a shareholder class action lawsuit. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m2dqnyk82c7gzpjf6p11wyh4)) - Note: The thread's core claim: the mechanics of the CEO's return and the litigation exposure they create. - Tags: atom/literature/h1 - Automattic has declined in value 83% in 5 years. Their revenue is likely bad, like really bad for such a decline to happen. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m2dqp6qm0942t1299fd54fzk)) - Note: Non sequitur: a private fund markdown bundles multiples, liquidity, and litigation risk; it does not establish revenue decline. - Tags: fallacy/non-sequitur - Matt’s only hope at this point is to find an investor stupid enough to buy out the other investors in a down round. If they’re even willing to sell. The other investors might prefer to sue and not sell just to stick it to Matt. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m2dqpa04g62ja784qqn40zk3)) - Note: False dilemma: excludes negotiated governance settlements, partial secondaries, debt, or a strategic sale. - Tags: fallacy/false-dilemma - If Matt cannot find another investor all he has left is the companies revenue which is in major decline but he just fired the CFO. There’s a good chance they won’t be making payroll sooner rather than later. Which means more layoffs. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m2dqp8c6t8rr7b327jb6nja9)) - Note: Slippery slope: no investor to no CFO to missed payroll to layoffs, with no probabilities and an inferred premise (revenue decline). - Tags: fallacy/slippery-slope - As the Internet moves towards becoming an agentic AI Internet, WordPress’s only hope is to become an agentic system. Merely using WordPress as a data store is not enough. It has to pivot to become part of the agentic stack but there’s really no one to drive such a radical change to the project and Matt would never allow it as it breaks 20 years of legacy development. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m2dqp19xcv9q9y4avhdck128)) - Note: The one forward-looking strategic claim; directly relevant to Core AI, Abilities API, and MCP adapter work. - Tags: atom/literature/h2 - I take no pride in this, as it means the destruction of the open web as we know it. Something I contributed many years of my life to building is now being destabilized and destroyed. It’s a shitty feeling, and I wish we had solved open source governance more effectively so this never could have happened. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m2dqp4b473t3atcc2hd67ems)) - Note: The emotional center and the governance thesis; the reason the thread circulated. - Tags: atom/literature/h3