Sometimes a story gets so convoluted that it’s hard to even summarize it.

Last year, we (and many others) were asking if Matt Mullenweg had literally gone insane.  He spent a fair amout of 2025 shrieking about the injustice being perpetrated by WPEngine…conveniently leaving out the fact that he used to own part of WPEngine and they weren’t doing anything new.  There’s a lot more – go read that story if you want some further evidence that he’s mad.

I think anyone with an ounce of sanity has moved as far as possible away from Automattic and WordPress.  Although lots of people still use the software just because of its giant ecosystem, I certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone host on wordpress.com.

Unstable people don’t reach islands of stability.  They just continue vomiting chaos all around them.

Case in point: Mullenweg’s last week.

According to news reports:

• The Automattic board of directors put Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence last week for reasons unstated.  Some employees said they were “ecstatic” over the news.
• Then they outright ousted Mullenweg as CEO.
• Mullenweg said they had been “conspiring” against him.
• He proceeded to sabotage the company’s Slack, kicking all other admins out.
• The media asked what was going on.  Mullenweg promised a blog post.
• But instead he posted about buying a houseboat.
• Then he was reinstated.

Um…what?

It’s the kind of nonsensical drama that Mullenweg loves: paranoid broadsides at others as the world revolves around him.  And apparently the board lacks backbone over the billionaire founder.

Why was Mullenweb originally put on leave?  “That they have a pretty good chance of getting a judge to say I spoiled evidence in a malicious way trying to hide something,” Mullenweg said, which is in reference to his ongoing legal jihad against WPEngine.  He also spun a conspiracy theory about how his camera was stolen at Burning Man and how it would lead to “smear attacks” and “hit pieces”.

He’s become such a pariah due to his mean-spirited paranoid attacks on not only his business competitors but people around him.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.