Fireship pointed out that the board members gave themselves a generous severance package in the very brief interim, so that was very possibly the whole plan.
A breach of fiduciary duty" describes Matt's behavior through all his escapades here. Minority shareholder rights are a thing, it just seems there are no minority shareholders willing enough to deal with Matt's nonsense to fight for it.
If there is any litigation, it opens Matt up to liability for the same thing. Unfortunately, as we've seen, Matt is willing to self-destruct himself and the company if it would effect sufficient self-glorification for him.
Yeah, if Mullenweg really did control a majority of the voting shares, the previous board are the villains in this story no matter what you think of Mullenweg.
If they can see that Mullenweg has lost it completely and beyond their ability to influence, and they also know that he’s a tyrant who would happily screw them, this seems like a fairly rational exit.
Obviously that may not be the case, but when the captain is steering the ship into rocks over and over the crew is going to take what they can and hit the lifeboats.
No, if the board doesn't believe it can continue to serve the company and meet its fiduciary duty, its obligation is to resign. CEO is an operational role; the board by design is not. It's a very big deal to "fire" the CEO, and doing so when you don't actually have the voting authority to follow through seems pretty close to malfeasance.
I mean it sounds like “board which does not actually have the legal ability to fire the CEO” is a fundamentally defective concept and shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the first place. But once it does and you are in that situation, I think you are obligated to make the best attempt you can at your nominal duties. I have no idea where you’re getting “malfeasance” from at this attempt.
What were they supposed to do? If you’ve been following Mullenweg’s behavior, he’s clearly unstable, and while this is admittedly armchair diagnosis, a lot of his recent writing gives me strong stimulant psychosis vibes. Granted maybe you shouldn’t take a job as a board member at a company where the CEO has 83% of voting shares to begin with, but once you’re there, you still have a fiduciary duty to do what’s best for the company, so IMO they were obligated to at least try and eject him.
Alternatively, Matt can resign if he doesn't like what his bosses did.
Instead he chose to vote out his bosses: also an apparently legal option, albeit one much worse for the company's fiscal situation.
Indeed, Matt has a fiscal responsibility to resign from the company and stfu. He's dragging it down for all the investors, of which he is only one, and doing it purely for personal glory. That is unethical.
I'm surprised anyone still uses wordpress after this whole sh!tshow, but outside HN folks probably don't even know. Just reading about it about it puts me off from the product and company.
A lot of people use Wordpress for multi-user or business sites and there isn't a replacement that will meet their needs that also doesn't require a higher degree of technical knowledge than they have. Any alternative more complex than Wordpress's install or that doesn't have feature parity with Wordpress' plugins is going to be a no-go for most of them.
It was also the worst absolute time to pull these stunts. Between static site generators, LLMs, and the open internet dying - he couldn't have picked a worse time to do his massive mask reveal power play. Wordpress was on the precipice of irrelevance and he gave it a massive shove.
Unless you want and can go with Shopify and go all in on their platform, WooCommerce is what you need to host an online store on hosting of your own choosing. Alternatives seem to lack the numbers to tackle issues when something goes wrong without too much downtime.
I did plenty of WP back in the day and I agree, historically, but each of the strong answers I had in my mind (db integration, editor, plugins, themes) are weakened substantially by the AI agents' ability to port a working site to a new framework. I totally agree for normal users still but for devs taking jobs on this do you think the barriers to switching have come down in size?
its getting buy-in, especially from people entrenched in their workflows, convincing management and sometimes legal depending on what plugins are being used.
Yeah, I'm left-swiping anything that involves working on it, outside of maybe being interested in helping people migrate to anything else. I don't know enough PHP to maintain one anyway, don't like what little of the language I do have exposure to, and want nothing to do with this toxic ecosystem.
It says he has 84% of the voting shares. Is there any possible way that the board could have been successful? Regardless of Mullenberg, (and I know he's controversial) a coup that is pre-ordained to fail seems like value destroying negligence.
> Special meetings of the stockholders may be called by the board of directors or by such person or persons as may be authorized by the certificate of incorporation or by the bylaws.
California law specifically allows for a meeting called by stockholders with 10% of the vote, but for Deleware, a large holder would need authorization in the bylaws. If there was no such provision, a board could plausibly control the company until the next annual meeting, or until court action. Annual meetings can be delayed a bit, but any stockholder can force one once they're a little late.
If you were concerned about the judgement of the CEO/majority holder, and you were optimistic that it was a temporary issue, it might make sense to remove said person for as long as possible; be it a few months or a day and a half.
They could have felt they were doing the right thing, and making a public statement of the situation, but knew it was a bit of a kamikaze tactic and so made it more painful for when the eventual backlash occurs.
It's an HDR image, I think.[0] At the moment, only some browsers show it as brighter—Firefox on macOS, for example, doesn't support HDR images and I had to open the page in Safari to see it for myself.
It's an 8-bit PNG of a magenta patch (with a dash of white), but the ICC profile is set to Rec.2020 PQ. So I think the high 255 values of 8-bit magenta/white will get mapped to very top of the PQ curve, which is like 10,000 nits (or whatever brightness your display can muster)
Apparently corporate structure gave him power over the board. Historically this kind of structure was considered undesirable and illegal in a public company, but beginning in the 2000s there was this idea that "visionary founders" should be able to demand absolute control, ex: Zuckerberg
Being on the board is a Sisyphean effort based on the weighted voting setup. Some seem to be slower to realize this. At that point, they could quit and walk away with nothing, or as others have suggested, this could have been done deliberately to at least get a payday on the way out.
Wordpress does not seem long for this world. How much of the Wordpress ecosystem is pure wasted resources, trying to be accommodating for all possibilities? As people see how easy Claude or Codex makes it to get off flat price Wordpress hosting and on to usage based platforms like Vercel, Wordpress usage will fade out. Feels like bloatware has no place in they coming world of AI customized software builds.
Most of the organizations/departments running wordpress aren't interested in customized software builds and all of the infrastructure that requires. They want something they can pay a simple monthly fee for, and host it with a company that deals with security, backup, etc.
So many people in this thread completely misunderstand what WP is being used for and by who. Most users simply have no idea that Automattic exists and probably wouldn’t care if they knew what’s going on.
WP users want a mature, easy to use framework, with lots of plugins, and a tutorial that can show you how to get anything done. Wordpress is the piece of software that kind of defines that genre. The fact that every host offers a Wordpress package seals the deal.
Add to that predictable flat pricing. If most Wordpress sites became famous overnight I guarantee 90% of users would rather the site go down than figure out what to do with 15 minutes of fame and a 50k hosting bill
Vote out dude who has 84% shareholder control.
Immediately sign yourself a golden parachute deal for 8 million right before getting fired the next day.
Seems like complete breach of fiduciary duty.
If there is any litigation, it opens Matt up to liability for the same thing. Unfortunately, as we've seen, Matt is willing to self-destruct himself and the company if it would effect sufficient self-glorification for him.
Obviously that may not be the case, but when the captain is steering the ship into rocks over and over the crew is going to take what they can and hit the lifeboats.
Ed sp
Instead he chose to vote out his bosses: also an apparently legal option, albeit one much worse for the company's fiscal situation.
Indeed, Matt has a fiscal responsibility to resign from the company and stfu. He's dragging it down for all the investors, of which he is only one, and doing it purely for personal glory. That is unethical.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49692654
Most other software wants more than the $100 one time payment that some random WordPress plugin demanded (VikBooking.)
"Some random WordPress plugin" is usually the main entry point. The core has a bad track record, but plugins are worse by far.
It was also the worst absolute time to pull these stunts. Between static site generators, LLMs, and the open internet dying - he couldn't have picked a worse time to do his massive mask reveal power play. Wordpress was on the precipice of irrelevance and he gave it a massive shove.
Unless you want and can go with Shopify and go all in on their platform, WooCommerce is what you need to host an online store on hosting of your own choosing. Alternatives seem to lack the numbers to tackle issues when something goes wrong without too much downtime.
(WooCommerce being a popular WordPress plugin.)
I did plenty of WP back in the day and I agree, historically, but each of the strong answers I had in my mind (db integration, editor, plugins, themes) are weakened substantially by the AI agents' ability to port a working site to a new framework. I totally agree for normal users still but for devs taking jobs on this do you think the barriers to switching have come down in size?
> Special meetings of the stockholders may be called by the board of directors or by such person or persons as may be authorized by the certificate of incorporation or by the bylaws.
California law specifically allows for a meeting called by stockholders with 10% of the vote, but for Deleware, a large holder would need authorization in the bylaws. If there was no such provision, a board could plausibly control the company until the next annual meeting, or until court action. Annual meetings can be delayed a bit, but any stockholder can force one once they're a little late.
If you were concerned about the judgement of the CEO/majority holder, and you were optimistic that it was a temporary issue, it might make sense to remove said person for as long as possible; be it a few months or a day and a half.
[1] https://law.justia.com/codes/delaware/title-8/chapter-1/subc...
That's less fiduciary duty and more hacking a payday.
A large golden parachute for firing a board member could be a disincentive mechanism to do it: a 'poison pill' of a kind.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_rights_plan
They could have felt they were doing the right thing, and making a public statement of the situation, but knew it was a bit of a kamikaze tactic and so made it more painful for when the eventual backlash occurs.
If they truly believe the CEO was destroying the company/its value.
2. I guess I should move my blog off Wordpress
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1998201848008679424/OGH...
[0] see, for example, this submission from the front page a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49402521.
WP users want a mature, easy to use framework, with lots of plugins, and a tutorial that can show you how to get anything done. Wordpress is the piece of software that kind of defines that genre. The fact that every host offers a Wordpress package seals the deal.