The WordPress CEO Meltdown
What's going on over at WordPress?
Lawsuits between rival companies, a war of words between a tech CEO and the media over a toilet paper dispute, and a login checkbox forcing users to declare that they enjoy pineapple on pizza.
What the hell is going on?
Matt Mullenweg - the founder of WordPress - is seemingly hellbent on destroying his own company in a dispute with hosting provider WP Engine.
It’s the most bizarre and unhinged nerd rage battle I’ve ever seen, and the situation somehow manages to keep getting weirder with each new development.
Here’s a brief history of the Mullenweg v. WP Engine beef for anyone who’s out of the loop.
How the Great WordPress-WP Engine War of 2024 started
The Matt Mullenweg vs. WP Engine drama started in September, when Mullenweg publicly called WP Engine a ‘cancer’ and accused them of profiting off the open source platform without contributing enough in return.
He also accused WP Engine of trademark violations.
Court documents show that Mullenweg’s company Automattic (note the cringe ‘Matt’ in the middle) demanded eight percent of WP Engine’s revenue (that’s gross, not net) be paid to them on a monthly basis.
WP Engine obviously refused.
WordPress then added a checkbox on their login/account creation page that required users to pledge ‘I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.’
WP Engine and Automattic then exchanged the inevitable cease-and-desist orders.
Shortly afterwards, WordPress blocked WP Engine customers from updating or installing plugins and themes on the WP Admin backend, causing tons of sites who were unlucky enough to be caught in the crossfire to suffer performance issues.
This created such a shitstorm that 8.4% of Automattic employees ended up resigning in protest.
WP Engine responded by filing a lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg; accusing him of libel, slander, attempted extortion, and unfair competition.
Things start getting weird
Instead of backing off like a normal person, Mullenweg became unhinged.
On November 6th, he launched a site called ‘WP Engine Tracker’ (wordpressenginetracker.com) to publicly show how many sites switched away from WP Engine towards other hosting providers.
The initial version of the site also included a spreadsheet with a list of sites who hadn’t switched in an attempt to shame them into compliance.
That was obviously a MAJOR privacy violation.
It goes without saying that competing hosting providers used the list to start spamming/soliciting clients:
WP Engine finally won an injunction on December 10th.
The court ordered WordPress to restore WP Engine’s access to the WordPress platform, remove the checkmark on the login page, and restore WP Engine’s access to the Advanced Custom Fields plugin.
The court also ordered Automattic to remove the list of WP Engine customers from the Tracker website.
Here’s what the site looks like now:
The spreadsheet is gone, but it shows a rotating list of sites that have ‘recently moved’ and which provider they switched to (e.g. Kinsta, Namecheap, etc.)
After the injunction, Mullenweg threw a tantrum on Slack, saying: ‘I’m sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine’
He then changed his username to ‘gone💀’.