I mean, I have a lot sharper words for him than that, but it gets the point across. I want to share two links:
The Verge — Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me’
Matt himself — Automattic Alignment
Honestly I have kind of thought he sucked ever since I saw the company name “Automattic,” years ago. But so much of what I’ve seen from him since then just reinforces it. He tries to act magnanimous, but he’s just like every other tech billionaire. You don’t get into that kind of position without having a grotesquely distorted sense of self-importance.
I get that what he intended by the statement “WordPress.org just belongs to me” is that he literally just owns the domain name. But it’s hard not to believe that the way that statement is easily misinterpreted is really what he feels. Yeah, he co-founded the WordPress open source project, as a fork of earlier blogging software called b2. But even if he were single-handedly responsible for the origins of WordPress — which he decidedly is not — it would still be a very tin-earred statement that an open source project “belongs” to an individual. (Honestly, the way he’s framing the battle against WP Engine these days makes it really seem like he wishes WordPress wasn’t GPL, so he didn’t legally have to allow it to remain open source forever.)
I don’t think Matt is as bad of a human being as Elon Musk, but there are similarities in their origins as guys who were part of something as it got off the ground and became huge, and were the ones who managed to take control and credit for everything. Then, perceived as unassailable technology and business geniuses, they were able to leverage their right-place-right-time moments to launch themselves to a level of status and wealth that is disproportionate to their actual contributions.
Anyway, suffice to say, as much as I live and breathe WordPress, I’ve been strongly critical of the direction Matt has insisted on taking the software for several years. It’s clear he has extreme conflicts of interest between his role as the leader of the open source project, and his multiple for-profit businesses that wouldn’t exist without it.
The worst part, to someone like me — a relatively small potatoes indie plugin developer/freelance web designer — is that he really does not seem to understand how WordPress is used in the real world. And it’s a worse product as a result.
If I had been an employee at Automattic this week, I absolutely would’ve taken the buy-out.