Matt Mullenweg says Automattic is ‘very short-staffed’ amid WordPress vs. WP Engine drama

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg says the company is “very short-staffed” amid WordPress’s ongoing drama with WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress. The WordPress co-founder took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Wednesday.

The saga began when Mullenweg called WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.” Mullenweg called out WP Engine, claiming that they don’t contribute sufficiently to the open source project and that WP Engine’s use of the “WP” brand has confused customers into believing it is part of WordPress.

The dispute has led to pushback from engineers, and even Automattic employees. On October 3, 159 Automattic employees who didn’t agree with Mullenweg’s direction of the company and WordPress overall took a severance package and left the company.

After 159 Automattic employees took the first deal, which included six months of severance, Mullenweg posted another alignment offer on Automattic Slack on October 17. This second deal offered nine months of severance, but employees only had four hours to respond.

“With the first deal, we cut off your access the same day,” Mullenweg said. “The second deal, we said, hey 159 left. We’ve seen a huge boost in businesses, so we’re hiring as fast as you can. So the second deal, if you’re the leaker, we’ll cut off access immediately. But, for others, we might ask them to stay on until possibly next year, just because we’re very short-staffed, so we kind of need to hire, so there were some other people that have taken it.”

Mullenweg’s comments indicate that Automattic was looking to catch the employee who was sharing company information with members of the press regarding the ongoing drama.

Mullenweg confirmed that before the saga began, Automattic had roughly 1,900 employees, and that the headcount is now at around 1,700.

The WordPress co-founder confirmed that Automattic hired 26 people in October amid the drama.

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