Matt Mullenweg, who turned 40 in January, has now spent more than half his life working on WordPress. He's never had such an insane two weeks. Wo

Why WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has gone 'nuclear' against tech investing giant Silver Lake

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2024-10-06 03:30:05

Matt Mullenweg, who turned 40 in January, has now spent more than half his life working on WordPress. He's never had such an insane two weeks.

WordPress, best known as a leading content management system, has hundreds of millions of sites currently using its templates, tools and plugins. But the WordPress universe is a complicated mishmash of open-source products, nonprofits, for-profit companies, trademarks and licenses.

The typically quiet but extremely important part of the internet — WordPress powers roughly 40% of all websites — has suddenly emerged as a major source of tech industry drama, threatening to upend an ecosystem that's long been viewed, from the outside at least, as collegial, thanks to its longevity and the various fun-loving camps and learning sessions it hosts every year.

While WordPress' technology is open source, meaning anyone can install it and use it for free, Mullenweg is also founder and CEO of Automattic, a venture-backed startup valued at $7.5 billion, as of 2021. WordPress.com is Automattic's central businesses, and individuals and companies pay anywhere from $4 a month to over $25,000 a year for services like ad products, security, customer support and inventory management.