Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic

After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.” 

Earlier this month, Mullenweg posed an “Alignment Offer” to all of his employees: Stand with him through a messy legal drama that’s still unfolding, or leave. 

“It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions,” he wrote on his personal blog on Oct. 3, referring to the ongoing dispute between himself and website hosting platform WP Engine, which Mullenweg called a “cancer to WordPress” and accusing WP Engine of “strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem. In the last month, he and WP Engine have volleyed cease and desist letters, and WP Engine is now suing Automattic, accusing Mullenweg of extortion and abuse of power.

In the “Alignment Offer,” Mullenweg offered Automattic employees six months of pay or $30,000, whichever was higher, with the stipulation that they would lose access to their work logins that same evening and would not be eligible for rehire.

One hundred and fifty-nine people took the offer and left. “However now, I feel much lighter,” Mullenweg wrote in his blog. 

But many stayed at Automattic even though they didn’t agree with Mullenweg’s actions, telling 404 Media they remained due to financial strain or the challenging job market. Several employees who remained at the company describe a culture of paranoia and fear for those still there. 

“Overall, the environment is now full of people who unequivocally support Matt’s actions, and people who couldn’t leave because of financial reasons (and those are mostly silent),” one Automattic employee told me. 

The current and former Automattic employees I spoke to for this article did so under the condition of anonymity, out of concerns about retaliation from Mullenweg. 

“I’m certain that Matt hasn’t eliminated all dissenters, because I’m still there, but I expect that within the next six to twelve months, everyone who didn’t leave but wasn’t ‘aligned’ will have found a new job and left on their own terms,” another current employee told me. “My personal morale has never been lower at this job, and I know that I’m not alone.”

Mullenweg himself, in internal screenshots viewed by 404 Media, acknowledged that his first “Alignment Offer” did not make everyone who disagreed with him leave the company. 

On Wednesday Mullenweg posted another ultimatum in Automattic’s Slack: a new offer that would include nine months of compensation (up from the previous offer of six months). Mullenweg wrote: 

“New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That’s water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt. Here’s a new one: You have until 00:00 UTC Oct 17 (-4 hours) to DM me the words, ‘I resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offer’ You don’t have to say any reason, or anything else. I will reply ‘Thank you.’ Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep you [sic] office stuff and work laptop; you will lose access to Automattic and Wong (no slack, user accounts, etc). HR will be in touch to wrap up details in the coming days, including your 9 months of compensation, they have a lot on their plates right now. You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won’t be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.”

“We have technical means to identify the leaker as well, that I obviously can’t disclose,” he continued. “So this is their opportunity to exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance and probably a big legal case for violating confidentiality agreement.” 

Mullenweg and Automattic did not respond to requests for comment. 

This is the latest in what has been a tense few months at Automattic. 

“Regarding escalations, to me, the most upsetting thing has been the way he’s treating current and former employees and WP community members,” one former employee who recently left the company after several years told me. “He clearly has no clue what people care about or how the community has contributed to the success of WordPress. It very clearly shows how out of touch he is with everyday reality. One, sharing pictures of him being on safari while all this shit is going down, as if people would think that was cool. Only rich tech bros would think that.” (Mullenweg posted photos from a trip on his personal blog and social media posts last week.) 

In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.  

“We were unaware that Matt redirected sign-up emails until current Automattic employees contacted our support team,” a spokesperson for Blind told me, adding that they’d “never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees from signing up for Blind by redirecting emails.”

Mullenweg didn’t block emails from the @teamblind.com domain, Blind said. According to Slack messages viewed by 404 Media, instead, he redirected those emails to himself.

“We are disappointed when we hear employers or executives try to limit access to Blind. Some of the most commonly discussed topics on Blind are protected speech in the U.S.—pay, job terminations, critiques of workplace conditions—which we believe workers should be free to access and discuss. Blind’s mission is to bring transparency to the workplace, as we believe it can inspire meaningful change,” the spokesperson for Blind said. “Employers’ attempts to block Blind are misguided and often have the opposite intended effect. Generally, we have seen more employees register and use Blind when their company tries to restrict access.” 

“The escalation since then just confirmed I made the right choice.”

One Automattic employee told me that Mullenweg’s interception of Blind emails was the thing that made them start looking for a new job. “For Matt to do that, without prior announcement, was equivalent to spying on his employees. And for him to think it’s ok to tell people to message him for their verification code is ridiculous—I’ve never questioned an employer’s judgment as much as I did in that moment (although it has happened many times since),” they said. “Clearly, Blind is designed to allow employee discussion free from employer interference, and he was trying to prevent that in the most obvious way possible.” 

Instead of Blind, employees have been posting on Anonymattic, an anonymous message board set up on WordPress’s own systems that allows all employees to post using one login. 

“A common theme for posts on Anonymattic is ‘Any time I try to get work done, some new drama comes up and I get distracted.’ I know that’s true for me,” an employee told me. 

“There is a vocal group of sycophants who are cheering on Matt’s actions via Anonymattic,” they said, “drawing favorable comparisons to how Elon Musk and Donald Trump operate. Their morale seems high, but I can’t relate.” Screenshots viewed by 404 Media show some staff having changed their Slack usernames to include “[STAYING]” to signal their support of Mullenweg and intention to remain at the company. 

Anonymattic was “conveniently closed down around Covid with the excuse of avoiding toxic discussions,” an employee told me. “I say conveniently because people would post their opinions and complaints to leadership that were sometimes uncomfortable. That’s when the Blind migration happened.” They said they believe Mullenweg’s interference with Blind emails was “an attempt to stop employees from joining Blind in some kind of intimidating fashion (are they collecting who is joining Blind? With what intentions?)” Anonymattic was reopened around that time, they said.

“At the end, even if anonymous, Automattic can delete posts there and not in Blind,” they said.

Last week, in response to someone criticizing his decision to add a checkbox to the WordPress.org login that forced users to denounce affiliation with WP Engine, Mullenweg posted in the WordPress contributor community Slack, “Wait until you see what we have in store for Thursday! And Friday. And Saturday. And Sunday. And Monday.” Several people posted vomiting and face-palm emojis in response to that message.

A recently-departed employee told me that the WP Engine legal drama wasn’t their final straw. “But in hindsight, it should have been,” they said. “The escalation since then just confirmed I made the right choice. At the time, I thought Matt might have a point about the trademarks (something I know little about), but he did say at the time he was going to treat this like a war and continue escalating it, because the truth was on his side. I guess we’re now seeing what that really meant.”