WordPress CEO Fired His Coup Plotters — After They Signed Each Other $8.15M in Golden Parachutes

The boardroom coup at Automattic lasted 33 hours. The golden parachutes it produced may last a lot longer.

In the brief window between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg being voted out as CEO of Automattic and his dramatic return, the company's interim CEO and its chief legal officer signed generous severance agreements — for each other. According to documents reviewed by TechCrunch, CFO Mark Davies, who became interim CEO during Mullenweg's 33-hour ouster, and chief legal officer Andy Missan each signed the other's exit package, effective September 10. The combined value of the two packages: $8.15 million that Automattic would now owe, since Mullenweg fired both men upon his return.

It is the kind of detail that turns a corporate governance scandal into a Silicon Valley morality play — and it is the newest revelation in a saga that has already included a midnight board vote, a hijacked company Slack, and the ouster of an entire board of directors.

The 33-hour coup: Automattic's board voted Mullenweg out on September 9 — he was back in control within two days.
Illustration: TechPulse USA (original artwork)

Thirty-three hours of chaos

The timeline, pieced together from TechCrunch's reporting and company statements, reads like a thriller compressed into a long weekend. On Wednesday, September 9, Automattic's board voted to put Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence, for reasons the board has never publicly explained. Mullenweg, in a company-wide Slack message, accused Davies of "conspiring" with three board members behind his back to force the vote through. He said he was given only 50 minutes' notice and was denied time to have the resolution reviewed by outside legal counsel. The board installed Davies as interim CEO.

What happened next was pure Mullenweg. The company had failed to remove him from the company Slack workspace — an almost comical operational oversight — and he seized control of it, removed the other admins, and began posting to staff. Davies' Slack account was deactivated. Late Thursday evening, Mullenweg told employees the board was "back in agreement" and that he was in control of Automattic. He punctuated the message with a link to LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out."

By Saturday evening, Automattic made it official. "Matt Mullenweg is the chairman and CEO of Automattic, with full support of the board," a company spokesperson told TechCrunch just after 5 p.m. ET on September 12 — a statement whose stilted, freshly-written tone told its own story about who was now in charge of the company's communications.

The $8.15 million handshake

What TechCrunch revealed this week is what happened inside the 33-hour window when the coup plotters held the company. Davies, elevated to interim CEO, and Missan, the chief legal officer, signed reciprocal severance agreements — each man signing the other's package — effective September 10.

The terms, per the documents TechCrunch reviewed, were generous in the extreme: 12 months of base salary paid out as a lump sum, an accelerated vesting schedule for their equity, the ability to exercise their vested stock options, and another year of health coverage. Between the two of them, accelerated equity plus a year of salary comes to $8.15 million.

That is the bill Automattic now faces, because one of Mullenweg's first acts upon returning was to fire both executives. The severance agreements they signed for each other would then entitle them to the payouts — a parting gift they effectively wrote themselves, during the brief period when the man who would fire them was locked out of his own company.

It is worth pausing on the audacity of the structure. Reciprocal severance — you sign mine, I sign yours — is not how exit packages are normally constructed at a functioning company. It is how they are constructed when the normal chain of authority has broken down and the people holding the pen know their time is short. Whether the agreements survive legal scrutiny is an open question Mullenweg's lawyers will presumably now test.

The $8.15 million question: Davies and Missan signed each other's severance deals during the 33-hour ouster.
Illustration: TechPulse USA (original artwork)

The board that voted — and then vanished

The severance deals were not the only casualty of Mullenweg's return. The entire board that voted him out is gone. Toni Schneider — Automattic's founding CEO, who now leads the open social network Bluesky — resigned his board seat and scrubbed a paragraph about his Automattic contributions from his personal website. Sue Decker's LinkedIn bio now records her Automattic board service as running from March 2020 through September 2026. Gen. Ann Dunwoody was removed by Mullenweg himself. Automattic, in a statement issued after midnight PT on a Sunday, acknowledged that people had left, while declining specifics.

Which raises the question the board has never answered: why did they move against Mullenweg in the first place? The September 9 vote came with no public explanation, and none has emerged since. Mullenweg's own framing — a "conspiracy" by a CFO and three directors, sprung on him with 50 minutes' notice — has filled the vacuum. His post on X the morning of September 11 offered the tone he wanted for the whole episode: "Founder advice: If you don't have a coup attempt every few years, you're not hiring strong enough leaders." He added, in a separate post, "I think this was my fifth."

The episode's strangeness peaked with Mullenweg's own communications. In the Slack takeover, he posted "I'm a pirate now" and cursed — behavior one source noted the famously profanity-averse Mullenweg had never displayed before. His promised explanatory blog post, when it dropped, was about buying a houseboat. Mary Hubbard, the executive director of WordPress.org, wrote on X that she was "relieved and pleased to see Matt Mullenweg return as CEO of Automattic," calling it the largest financial contributor to the WordPress project.

Why this matters beyond the drama

It would be easy to file this under Silicon Valley soap opera — and the details are undeniably entertaining. But Automattic is not a normal startup. It is the commercial engine behind WordPress, which powers more than a third of all websites on the internet. It owns WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Beeper. A governance crisis at Automattic is, at some remove, a governance question for a meaningful fraction of the web.

The 33-hour coup also belongs to a recognizable genre. Mullenweg's ouster and return inevitably recalls OpenAI's November 2023 boardroom battle, when Sam Altman was fired by his board on a Friday and reinstated the following Tuesday with a new board — an episode that reshaped how the industry thinks about founder control. The industry keeps relearning the same lesson: in a founder-led company, the board's formal power and the founder's actual power are different things, and the gap between them only becomes visible during a coup. Mullenweg closed that gap in 33 hours; his board is gone, and he is chairman and CEO "with full support of the board" — a board he now, presumably, gets to rebuild.

And then there is the $8.15 million. Golden parachutes are a familiar feature of corporate America, but they are usually negotiated with the board and disclosed in filings. These were negotiated by two executives, for each other, during a governance vacuum, days before being fired by the man they tried to replace. If Automattic's lawyers can void them, they will. If they can't, the coup's organizers walk away with eight figures for 33 hours of interim leadership — and the strangest severance story of the year gets its final chapter.

Sources: TechCrunch (Sept. 11, 12, 14 and 16, 2026); The Verge (Sept. 11, 2026, via archive); 404 Media; Search Engine Journal. Related: our look at OpenAI's rise to a $1.2T valuation — Silicon Valley's other famous founder-board showdown.