Today, I’m talking with Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, Tumblr, and a whole host of other products like the new cross-platform messaging service Beeper.
This is Matt’s third time on Decoder; back in 2022, we had him on twice, first to talk about Automattic and WordPress broadly and then to talk about Tumblr and the future of social networking. He’s back now because Automattic just turned 20, and I really wanted to talk about how the next 20 years of running one of the most dominant platforms on the web might look as changes to search and AI threaten to change everything else, and various lawsuits threaten to change the nature of WordPress itself.
Make no mistake, WordPress is one of the most dominant platforms on the web, if not the most dominant. Something like 43 percent of websites run on WordPress, in one of its many flavors. That includes The Verge — the backend of our website is hosted by WordPress VIP. So this might be the first reverse disclosure on the show. Technically, we’re Matt’s customer, and like any good customer, I made feature requests.
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A big reason for that is WordPress is open-source, and like so many open-source projects, WordPress has a very complex structure. There’s the nonprofit WordPress Foundation that owns the WordPress trademark. There’s WordPress.org, from which the open-source project is managed by Matt himself. Then there’s Automattic, which is the for-profit company that offers its own site hosting and enterprise services on top of the core WordPress technology, and which contributes an enormous amount of code back to the open-source WordPress project.
Understanding that structure is really important because there has been a lot of drama in the world of WordPress recently. Last year, Matt essentially went to war, publicly and in the courts, against a hosting company called WP Engine that competes with Automattic. Matt felt WP Engine wasn’t operating in the spirit of open-source by contributing very little back to the WordPress code base.
So Matt filed a lawsuit against the company while revoking its access to core WordPress technologies. Many people felt this was incredibly out of bounds for Matt and a violation of his position as a central steward of the WordPress project, and there has been significant fallout at Automattic and the broader WordPress community.
It’s been a long, drawn-out saga. WP Engine countersued, and Automattic was forced to reverse some of its retaliatory efforts against the company. But the lawsuits are ongoing, and they’re far from resolved. That said, Matt was willing to come on the show and talk through some of this thinking here, why he made some of the decisions he did, and also what he regrets about how some of this went down.
Matt and I talked about the future of the web, too, and how he’s thinking about the changes we’re seeing to search and website sustainability as the generative AI boom continues to upend how people use the internet. Matt is notably a lot more optimistic about this than many of the website owners we hear from regularly here at The Verge, and he’s not convinced AI is going to wreck the web.
We also talked about Beeper, the cross-platform messaging service that Automattic acquired last year. Beeper got into some hot water with Apple when it tried and ultimately failed to bring iMessage to Android. But Matt is really excited about Beeper’s core product. Automattic has acquired a couple other startups and effectively combined them all to try and supercharge Beeper’s growth in the coming months and years.
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