There are two great Cloudflare-related stories published this weekend. The first is Steven Levy’s incredible story about Tim Jenkin, who created a secure communication protocol for the African National Congress to overthrow the apartheid regime in South Africa. Cloudflare’s CTO, John Graham-Cumming, later helped break past the cryptography system’s lost password, which he blogged about … Continue reading Cloudflare Stories →

It’s a heavy day, and I’m sad to write this. Not sure where to start. In 2022, a lawyer recruited two people who took care of my Mom—an assistant and one of her dozen nurses—to resign and demand a million dollars each, or they would publish horrible things about her in a lawsuit. I refused. … Continue reading Those Other Lawsuits →

I’ll just remind everyone at the start that this a respectful debate, and DHH and I tried to get on a call but couldn’t because we were both traveling. However, “Automattic is doing open source dirty” is an abomination of a headline, and David’s second post Open source royalty and mad kings, is just sloppy. … Continue reading Response to DHH →

Last Friday we said goodbye to 159 colleagues as part of our alignment offer. It was a tough day, there are a lot of close relationships within Automattic, and goodbyes are always hard. On Monday, I got to be Oprah for a few minutes. We had scheduled a town hall for leaders around the company … Continue reading Everyone’s An Owner →

Yesterday in the African bush was great, I saw giraffes, zebras, warthogs, leopard turtles, elephants. Today wasn’t great: I witnessed a rhino shot with a tranquilizer from a helicopter, then it was held down, had its horns cut off, and then shaved down. I have some photos and videos from the event but I’m not … Continue reading Rhino Dehorning →

Ari Levy at CNBC has a great article covering the battle between WordPress and Silver Lake / WP Engine: Why WordPress [co-]founder Matt Mullenweg has gone ‘nuclear’ against tech investing giant Silver Lake.

Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Since I last blogged here, WP Engine filed a meritless lawsuit and Automattic responded, and there’s been a hurricane of public activity and press. Inside of Automattic, there’s been a parallel debate and process. Silver Lake and WP Engine’s attacks on me and Automattic, … Continue reading Automattic Alignment →

On Thursday a prominent developer YouTuber, Twitch streamer, and journalist posted a video titled This might be the end of WordPress. It was very harsh. In that video you’ll hear him say about me, “he’s a chronic hater” (7:55), “seems like he’s been a pretty petty bastard for a long time now” (10:22), “I hate … Continue reading On with Theo / T3.gg →

Lee controls the board of WP Engine. The board is why WP Engine hasn’t done a trademark deal for their use of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. You hide behind lawyers and corporate PR when you’re wrong, not when you’re right. I’m replying on Twitter, I’m commenting on Reddit and Hacker News, I’m dropping into … Continue reading Where is Lee Wittlinger? →

Anil Gupta has made an amazing commitment to the WordPress ecosystem. I applaud the way he runs his business.

I dropped on the livestream for ThePrimeagen earlier today after a colleague pinged me that he was talking about the Silver Lake / WP Engine situation. Afterward, I also privately shared with him the cell phone for Heather Brunner, the WP Engine CEO, so she can hop on or debate these points. As far as … Continue reading On ThePrimeagen →

I’ve been writing and talking about WP Engine a lot in the last week, but I want to be crystal clear about the core issue at play. In short, WP Engine is violating WordPress’ trademarks. Moreover, they have been doing so for years. We at Automattic have been attempting to make a licensing deal with … Continue reading WPE & Trademarks →

I knew going to war with Silver Lake, a $102B private equity firm, they would pull out every dirty trick to try to smear my name, do oppo research, imply I’m a mafia boss trying to extort them, etc. I have kept my personal philanthropy private until now. I would like to offer up one … Continue reading Charitable Contributions →

I wrote a bit more on Lee Wittlinger / Silver Lake and WP Engine over on WordPress.org: WP Engine is not WordPress.

Some people have been interpreting my comments around private equity and investors as saying they’re all bad and you should never accept investment or trust a company that does… I don’t agree with that at all. Investors are amazing, they’re the fuel of entrepreneurship and capitalism and responsible for most of what we enjoy today. … Continue reading Are Investors Bad? →

(This post should be read while listening to Wish by Joshua Redman. The writing is synchronized to the music reading speed.) Contributor day just wrapped up for Portland for WordCamp US. If you ever have a chance to visit a WordCamp, I recommend it. It’s an amazing group of people brought together by this crazy … Continue reading WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinking →

It’s a tough pick, but I think Inside Out 2 might be my favorite Pixar movie. Just everything about it was just so well done. How they incorporated the different aesthetics, neuralinguistic concepts, everything. Chef’s kiss.

I had a huge nostalgia blast today with this video from Lazy Game Reviews showing and setting up a Timex Datalink watch, which was a “smart” watch that would show data that you transmitted to it by holding it in front of your CRT monitor and it flashing a bunch of lines. It’s hard to … Continue reading Timex Datalink →

I love a good birthday blog post, and Stephen Wolfram has delivered the most epic for his 65th birthday. I’m so honored that WordPress is one of the tools in his toolkit.

This is my 9th Burning Man; I started coming in 2013. It’s incredible how much it has changed and evolved in that time. I love seeing all the technology and engineering advances every year. In my time it has gone from more fire and flashlights to LEDs with rainbow and color everywhere. I drove in … Continue reading Burning Man So Far →

There’s an apocryphal story about Ernest Shackleton putting an ad in the newspaper that read: Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success. If you’ve read the book Endurance by Alfred Lansing, you know how that went. … Continue reading People Wanted →

When we had some calm seas while I was on the Drumfire, with my schedule unusually clear, I found myself writing Python with Claude to export and analyze all of my Swarm check-in activity. I have 14,021 check-ins. So now on my about page it lists the ~70 countries I’ve been to and the top … Continue reading Best Cities →

I’m always trying out new things. First, something fun: my friend Jesse gifted me a very cool Gameboy-like device called the Anbernic RG35XX, at ~$46. It has almost every game you remember, like if you got all the cartridges at Toys R Us or checked them out at Blockbuster. Having something without Wi-Fi, notifications, etc., … Continue reading Anbernic, Sol, and Daylight →

We no longer need companies, institutions, or government to organize us. We now have the tools to organize ourselves. We can find each other and coalesce around political causes or bad companies or talent or business or ideas. We can share and sort our knowledge and behavior. We can communicate and come together in an … Continue reading Jeff Jarvis →

I’ve had many blessings in my life, but the very first was the family I was born into. Today, I’d like to tell you about my only sibling, favorite sister, and best beloved, Charleen Mullenweg. With a gap of nine and a half years between us, we could have easily been distant from each other, … Continue reading Happy Birthday, Charleen →

As I wrote the other day, don’t constrain your mentors by their availability. Today, I’d like to highlight someone I consider a mentor, who I’ve never met, and now that he’s passed away, I never will, Jim Simons. I’m mildly obsessed with the culture and results of Renaissance Technologies, Jane Street, Jump Trading, and Two … Continue reading Jim Simons RIP →

A nice new WordPress 6.6 is out, our 50th release, on the same day people are getting hit with huge bills from Webflow. I really enjoy working in Open Source. There is no more customer-centric license. There’s some really fun stuff cooking, too, I can’t wait to show y’all. 50 releases… wow. No matter what … Continue reading 6.6 →

In Torino / Turin this year I decided to give a slightly different talk than normal, building on my post I did for WordPress turning 21. And here’s the Q&A, where I got challenged and accepted to do a speed build. 🙂

It was so cool to see WordPress highlighted (although with a lowercase P in in the closed captioning) on the Apple keynote today.  I recommend watching the entire keynote, but especially the Apple Intelligence section starting at 1:04 not because we’re mentioned but because it shows the future of computing, which is the future of … Continue reading Apple Intelligence →

Gravatar, which has been humming along quietly serving hundreds of billions of avatars into every app you love like Slack, Github, ChatGPT, Atlassian, Coinbase… has a new API which allows people to bring in not just the avatar but more profile data. Check it out. Gravatar continues to be a useful Schelling point for the … Continue reading Gravatar is Back →