Matt Mullenweg is back as chairman and CEO of Automattic, with full board support, after what Sarah Perez reported as an attempted ouster. The story is being filed under corporate drama. The right file is somewhere between philosophy and organizational theory.
When the Founder Is the Constitution
Automattic owns WordPress.com, the commercial layer on top of WordPress, the open-source software that powers roughly 43% of the internet. Mullenweg is simultaneously the lead developer of WordPress.org, the nonprofit community project. He is both the king and the commons. When the board tried to remove the king, the commons had no clear successor because the ideology of the project, open source as civic infrastructure, had been so completely identified with one person's interpretation of it that separating them was structurally impossible. This is the founding-founder problem at its most acute. OpenAI ran a version of it when the board fired Sam Altman in 2023 and discovered, in 72 hours, that the institution and the individual were not separable. Altman now says an IPO in 2026 would be ill-advised, which is its own quiet acknowledgment that OpenAI's value is not yet legible in the formats markets use to price things.
Open Source as Affect, Not Architecture
The deeper problem both cases share is that open source and non-profit structures were designed to prevent exactly this kind of power concentration, and they have failed to do so. They failed not because the legal structures were wrong but because communities coalesce around individuals, not constitutions. A 2024 paper in the Journal of Information Technology by Riehle et al. found that major open source projects are significantly more dependent on single contributors for core architectural decisions than their governance documents suggest. Mullenweg's return is not a restoration. It is a confession. The community did not choose open source because of its architecture. It chose it because of the person who kept showing up. Brewster Kahle's conversation about building the global brain touches the same nerve: public infrastructure built on private charisma is a bet on the person, not the commons, and that bet eventually comes due.