Standing in a bathroom at Automattic’s San Francisco offices, Matt Mullenweg is talking to me about toilet paper. He tells me about a time he used a bathroom at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters, only to encounter shoddy toilet paper and harsh liquid soap. “Why would a multibillion-dollar company be cheap about toilet paper and soap?” he muses. “These details matter. People care.”

Stooping to fling open a storage cabinet built into the bathroom wall, he points to a neat stack of wrapped toilet paper rolls. “The best toilet paper you can buy,” he assures me. “How much extra does really nice toilet paper cost? A buck or two?” The handsome bottles of soap by the sinks are premium too, he adds.

I ask him who at Automattic, the estimated $710 million-per-year company of which Mullenweg is CEO, is responsible for toilet paper and soap quality control?

“Me,” he says, beaming.

Of course, Mullenweg’s control of Automattic extends well beyond the bathroom walls. So does his control over WordPress, the open-source web-content management software that he co-created two decades ago, and that now powers nearly half the web—as well as Automattic’s revenue. He has been referred to by many as the “benevolent dictator for life,” or BDFL, of WordPress, but in recent months, as a spat with an underdog rival unfolded on social media, Mullenweg definitely has come across as more dictatorial than benevolent.

“I don’t identify with the term ‘dictator,’” he says. “A nicer way of saying it would be ‘enlightened leader.’” But just how tightly Mullenweg controls WordPress, and how aggressively he’s willing to wield that control, has caught many by surprise over the past few months. And it all began when Mullenweg got very annoyed, very publicly, at a $400 million-per-year company called WP Engine.

On September 25, more than 1.5 million websites around the world suddenly lost the ability to make automatic software updates. These sites all used WordPress, which since 2003 has always been freely available to anyone who wants to use it, updates and all.

The sites also had another thing in common. They all ran on servers operated by WP Engine, the second largest provider of WordPress-related products and services. The problem? WP Engine had royally pissed off Matt Mullenweg for not contributing enough to the open-source community, in his opinion. Mullenweg claims he had been in negotiations with WP Engine for months to get it to cough up its fair share one way or another, but finally decided the company had dragged its feet for too long, leading him to break off talks and go public with his ire.

Mullenweg is chairman of the WordPress Foundation—the nonprofit that supports WordPress and oversees its trademarks, and he controls the website that serves as the gateway to WordPress resources. He is also the founder and CEO of Automattic, the largest business in the WordPress ecosystem. Although WordPress software is freely available, many sites pay companies like Automattic and WP Engine to customize and host their WordPress websites.

Over the course of about six weeks, the WordPress world seemed to devolve from productive harmony into discord and confusion, as Mullenweg pressed his attacks and WP Engine fired off legal salvos, leaving customers and community members stunned and appalled.

Since late September, a nonstop tsunami of social media outrage has surged toward Mullenweg for weaponizing key WordPress resources. The idea that one person possesses the power to instantly hobble an enormous chunk of the web—and Mullenweg’s willingness to flex that power to chop down a competitor—left companies everywhere wondering how vulnerable their own websites may be.

Mullenweg not only removed access to features for WP Engine employees and customers, but also used the WordPress platform and social media channels to persuade WP Engine customers to switch providers. He even created a website to track how many customers have left WP Engine (more than 25,000). He also silenced potential criticism in his own company by forcing Automattic employees to quickly decide if they would support his crusade or leave with generous severance packages. The moves stunned the tech world, raising doubts about the software that powers almost half of the sites on the internet—including Inc.’s website.

Mullenweg believes he’s standing up for what’s right. He has publicly accused WP Engine of failing to contribute to the community efforts that are essential to maintaining and improving WordPress, even while WP Engine profits from the platform. He also claims WP Engine violated WordPress trademark rights and needs to pay up.

WP Engine, which denies those claims, has filed a lawsuit against Mullenweg and Automattic. “This is a case about abuse of power, extortion, and greed,” WP Engine says in its suit. Recently, a California district judge seemed sympathetic to that argument, ordering Automattic to restore WP Engine’s access to all WordPress resources until the case is decided. (WP Engine declined to make an executive available to talk about any matters related to the litigation.)

Mullenweg’s war on WP Engine has also cast a shadow over the entire world of open-source software—software that, like WordPress, can be freely downloaded and modified. Open-source software of various types is widely used throughout the world, precisely because it is seen as being free from the risk of proprietary abuse. But the WordPress debacle has demonstrated all too sharply that this belief may have been misplaced.

Most of all, it has raised questions about Mullenweg himself. The CEO has long been widely admired as an entrepreneur who has tirelessly championed the notion that publishing should be accessible and affordable to anyone. As a leader, he is often regarded as a pioneering prophet of a future of work that confers more freedom and agency for employees.

But much of that good will seems to have dissipated over the past few months. Among the more influential figures who have publicly aired their dismay toward Mullenweg is David Heinemeier Hansson, the entrepreneur who created and oversees the popular open-source software-programming platform Ruby on Rails. DHH, as he is widely known, took to a widely circulated post to call out Mullenweg’s actions as “dramatic overreaches,” “breaches of open source norms,” and “unhinged.”

“Matt, don’t turn into a mad king,” he implored. “It’s not too late.”

Or is it? With some of Mullenweg’s own employees heading for the exits, and a global community furiously pillorying him, it could be difficult to restore his reputation. As one WordPress community member put it in a post on X, expressing the sentiments of thousands: “Can’t believe I used to look up to him as a mentor.”

All of which raises the question: What is Matt Mullenweg thinking?

Automattic’s San Francisco office, nominally the company’s headquarters, is an airy, elegant, mostly open space sprawling across the top floor of a contemporary medium-rise building plunked down in the funky Mission District of the city, among nail salons, barbecue joints, and used-clothing shops.

Most striking is the near-total lack of human presence and signage to indicate that there’s a business here, let alone one as large and influential as Automattic. The building and offices almost look as if they’ve recently been abandoned—the rolls of luxury toilet paper remain stacked and waiting. But that’s just how Automattic rolls. Mullenweg founded the company as an entirely virtual one in 2005, two years after WordPress was released. The 1,750 employees—a number that reflects the more than 150 who have left in the past few months—are scattered officeless across 90 countries. The headquarters is more or less a token one, used only when physical meetings are needed in the area.

In person, Mullenweg comes off as surprisingly chill when we meet on October 22, given all the angry online noise and employee turmoil surrounding the WP Engine beef for the past three weeks. He is a young-looking, animated 40 with a near-constant grin, and his neat beard and shawl-collar cardigan sweater contribute to his laid-back air. But he readily concedes the stress is taking a toll. “I’m operating at, like, 15 percent right now,” he says, settling back into a sofa in the living room-like setup at the center of the open space. “My sleep hasn’t been great in the past few weeks.”

Perhaps there’s a price to pay when you mess with one of the world’s most popular products. But Mullenweg suggests the current situation will blow over. “This sort of thing comes up every five or 10 years,” he says. “Being open and transparent means sometimes you get taken advantage of by a bully. You have to stand up—that’s the only thing that makes it stop.” He adds that history has proved him right, and the same will happen in this battle. Others aren’t so sure.

In 2003, Mullenweg was a 19-year-old college drop-out living with his parents in Houston, blogging about whatever happened to be on his mind—often philosophy, politics, and economics, the focus of his two years of classes at the University of Houston.

Back then, his biggest concern was figuring out what platform to blog on. He was a fan of B2, an open-source software blogging platform. But B2 had been abandoned by its developers, and needed fixing up. In a blog post, Mullenweg mused about trying to revamp it. Though he had never studied programming, he had been teaching himself to code by contributing to various open-source software projects. Two days later, a comment popped up under the post from a U.K. coder named Mike Little: Would he like some help?

A few months later, Mullenweg released the results and followed a friend’s advice to name it WordPress—only after checking to make sure the domain names WordPress.com and WordPress.org were available. This domain ownership would prove critical.

The nascent WordPress software was what is known in the open-source world as a fork—a substantially altered version of an existing open-source program, in this case B2. WordPress would essentially be a new open-source program.

Though there are different versions of open-source licenses, the general idea is that anyone can freely download and use the software, and anyone can modify it as they see fit, and then release it as their own version. But the original developer of the fork retains the trademark rights. And when it comes to WordPress, the rights belonged to Mullenweg.

The open-source software movement is sometimes mistakenly seen as an anti-commercial-enterprise movement, as if the fact that the software is free means no one should profit off it. Mullenweg laughs at that misconception when I mention it to him. “Actually, open source can be profoundly capitalistic,” he says.

Mullenweg had astutely recognized the real money in WordPress would be in add-on software, or plugins, for WordPress websites, and especially in hosting them. He offered Automattic’s paid and ad-supported service via WordPress.com (as opposed to WordPress.org, the site that distributes free WordPress software).

Blurring the line between the two, even if just in name, would help Automattic leverage WordPress’s sterling open-source reputation to funnel paying customers its way. And it would play a big role in his eventual beef with WP Engine.

A 2020 study commissioned by WP Engine calculated the value of all business driven by WordPress to be $600 billion, and growing rapidly. No one gets a bigger piece of that pie than Automattic. The company also includes more than a dozen non-WordPress businesses, including the social media platform Tumblr, but WordPress is its bread and butter.

Mullenweg remains sole owner of the website WordPress.org, through which the world not only downloads WordPress software for free, but also receives maintenance and improvement updates. It’s also where the world finds and accesses the roughly 60,000 plugins that provide much of WordPress’s critical functionality, such as website-building tools, payment-collecting features, and security. Plugins also provide much of the revenue that companies derive around WordPress. WordPress.org also controls access to WordPress themes, essentially design templates, another big revenue generator for the industry.

In the growing WordPress ecosystem, Austin-based WP Engine, founded by Jason Cohen and Ben Metcalfe in 2010, has risen to become Automattic’s biggest competitor, providing website hosting and services such as its staging area, which lets sites test changes before rolling them out. But it’s now clear that for at least several months before his September blow-up, Mullenweg hadn’t been happy with how the business, run by CEO Heather Brunner, operated.

In his initial public complaints, delivered in a blog post and at a talk at a WordPress event on September 20, Mullenweg said WP Engine doesn’t donate enough of its software engineers’ time to improving WordPress, later calling WP Engine a “cancer.” (Automattic contributes 3,915 hours per week to WordPress.org, he claimed, compared with just 40 hours for WP Engine.)

It’s a classic gripe in the open-source world, known as the maker-taker problem. Companies that profit from an open-source project are expected to help maintain and improve it, but there’s no good mechanism for forcing them to do so. In fact, Mullenweg himself has in the past noted that it’s against the spirit of open source to demand contributions; chipping in should be offered, not required. “It works best when there’s no expectations,” he told the Harvard Business Review in 2015.

But on September 25, Mullenweg took matters into his own hands, blocking WP Engine and its customers from updating the WordPress software running their websites and accessing key WordPress resources.

Mullenweg’s initial blocking of WP Engine from WordPress.org lasted from September 25 to September 27, leaving WP Engine and its customers scrambling. One of those customers was Nick Cernak, who founded and runs Northstar Digital Design, a website development company in Minneapolis. Cernak was checking in on the WordPress-based, WP Engine-hosted website he had recently built for a nonprofit when he noticed some pages were marred by blank patches, question marks, and red X’s. An effort to update the website triggered a stream of error messages.

Initially baffled, a quick check of social media made it clear that he—and by extension all of his many clients with websites hosted on WP Engine—were victims of Mullenweg’s war. “I was shocked,” recalls Cernak. “I had always thought very highly of Matt, but this was a complete 180, it was unprofessional, it was wrong. And I was collateral damage.”

Mullenweg had another complaint: WP Engine was violating Automattic’s trademark rights over the WordPress name, based on the fact that WP Engine freely used the abbreviation “WP,” and that “WordPress” appeared throughout its website. He suggested that many WP Engine customers were misled by these supposed abuses into thinking they were doing business with a company that was in some way officially affiliated with WordPress. This in spite of the fact that almost every company in the WordPress ecosystem uses the name “WordPress” freely to describe their products and services, and that Automattic itself on its website had long explicitly OK’d the free use of “WP.” Only after the dispute with WP Engine did the company qualify that permission.

Mullenweg would know. When WordPress started to catch on in 2005, he wasted no time in monetizing its popularity. He founded Automattic—a spelling that smuggles Mullenweg’s first name inside. It quickly released two products: a paid subscription service that protected WordPress blogs from spam, and a paid or ad-supported service that made it easy to build a simplified WordPress website hosted on Automattic’s servers.

After his initial block of WP Engine, Mullenweg reopened the company’s access for three days to give it a chance to set up its own servers for distributing WordPress and updates to its otherwise stranded customers. Then he reinstated the block. For good measure, on October 9 he added a check box on WordPress.org’s login and registration pages that required users to state they weren’t affiliated with WP Engine. No explanation of what “affiliation” included was offered.

WP Engine filed suit against Mullenweg and Automattic on October 2. The suit describes WP Engine as “a true champion of WordPress,” while decrying “the petulant whims of Mullenweg.” The suit goes on to claim that prior to his attacks, Mullenweg had been privately demanding that WP Engine pay Automattic a whopping 8 percent of its gross revenue in lieu of volunteer work hours on WordPress. Mullenweg threatened to embark on a smear campaign against WP Engine if it didn’t agree within 48 hours to pay up, the suit alleges, a demand it labels extortion. The suit also dismisses the trademark infringement claims as counter to the letter and spirit of everything Mullenweg has said and done in the past.

On October 12, Mullenweg struck out at WP Engine again. WP Engine had long ago developed and continued to maintain what had become an essential WordPress add-on, or plugin: Advanced Custom Fields, or ACF, a tool used by more than 4.5 million websites throughout the WordPress world to simplify and speed webpage development. Without warning, Mullenweg removed ACF from the WordPress.org plugin directory, invoking an obscure clause in the directory agreement. He replaced ACF in the directory with a new, forked version whipped up by Automattic, called Secure Custom Fields. Anyone looking for ACF in the directory would end up with Automattic’s new SCF instead.

Social media widely accused Mullenweg of having essentially stolen the plugin. “If Matt thought he would have a lot of support for these moves, he miscalculated,” says Marc Benzakein, a marketing consultant who has been active in the WordPress industry and community. “The majority of the community has turned against him in a highly vocal way.”

“People thought WordPress.org belonged to the community and the Foundation, not that it was Matt’s personal website,” says Benzakein. “The irony is that no one would have cared, but he brought attention to it by breaking it.”

Whenever Mullenweg is accused of being too controlling, he often points out he turned over control of WordPress trademarks to a nonprofit called the WordPress Foundation. He created the Foundation in 2010, and did indeed assign it WordPress trademark rights. But few people who have looked at the Foundation take its independence seriously. Mullenweg is chairman of its three-person board. Little is known about the other two members, and their names scarcely appear on the Foundation’s website. As far as anyone can tell, Mullenweg’s control over the Foundation is for all practical purposes absolute. He regained control of the WordPress trademark rights, too; almost immediately after it was founded, the Foundation exclusively licensed those rights to Automattic.

Mullenweg has made it clear that it is he himself, in fact, and not the community or anyone else, who controls key WordPress resources. He has emphasized that he outright owns the WordPress.org website, and can do whatever he wants with it, full stop.

In our meeting, Mullenweg is open about his control over WordPress. “The most successful open-source projects are led by BDFLs,” he told me, referring to the benevolent dictator for life label.

Until recently, the world generally accepted that flattering self-assessment. Mullenweg’s stewardship of WordPress was widely praised as he nurtured a vast, global community of people who freely contributed to improving WordPress. More than 600 people helped design and code the most recent release of WordPress, only about 50 of whom were Automattic employees.

Mullenweg’s management of Automattic has won him nearly as much praise. He wasn’t the first to create and run a virtual company, but doing so with a company of Automattic’s size, success, and impact seemed an almost futuristic feat. He regards a measure of physical presence as essential: He requires everyone in Automattic to set aside one month a year for in-person meetings, and spends much of his own time visiting a workforce scattered across 90 countries.

He also pioneered a new type of work structure: the “asynchronous” organization, where electronic messaging and project management tools efficiently coordinate the efforts of people who are contributing whenever and from wherever they chose. The Harvard Business Review lauded him more than once for his innovative management approaches. (So did Inc.)

I ask Mullenweg how he feels about the sudden massive downshift in his public standing from this long-standing adulation to widespread condemnation. He answers as if the recent evaporation of support were merely a hypothetical possibility, not an ongoing crisis. “If my decisions were not in line with the community,” he says, “I would lose them immediately.”

Given that Automattic is competing fiercely with WP Engine, it should not be surprising that Mullenweg sees WP Engine as something of an enemy. Even so, it is hard to reconcile the aggressive actions he has taken in the current skirmish with the soft-spoken and thoughtful-sounding Mullenweg I met at Automattic’s offices.

He emphasizes that his stance is a last-resort one that has come at the end of what he describes as an effort stretching over 18 months to get WP Engine to stop behaving in what he saw as unfair ways. “We did everything we could to resolve it, in my opinion,” he says. “And then at some point you say, well, we have to stand up for what we believe is right.”

What he believes is right, he makes clear, is the word and spirit of open source. He notes that he requires every new Automattic employee to sign the company’s creed at their hiring. “The creed says that open source is the most powerful idea of my generation, and that I’m working for impact, not just money,” he says. For Mullenweg, impact and open source seem to be one and the same. “I believe open source to be sort of my religion, if you will,” he explains.

He has gone to battle to defend his religion before. In 2010, Mullenweg went after a company called Thesis, one of the pioneers of the WordPress theme business. Like most theme vendors in the early years of that small subindustry, it sold its themes under a proprietary—that is, non-open-source—license. But in 2008, Mullenweg cleaned house of all theme vendors who refused to switch to an open-source license. Only Thesis held out.

In response, Mullenweg offered to pay Thesis users to switch. He also reportedly paid $100,000 to acquire the domain name Thesis.com from a third party and had the name direct to an Automattic blog about theme design. (It still does.) Thesis eventually gave in. But many in the WordPress community were put off by what they saw as Mullenweg’s vindictive, bullying behavior, and some eventually even left WordPress for other publishing platforms because of it.

It is the Thesis dispute that Mullenweg refers me to when he claims that history is on his side in the current dispute, and that it will all be resolved without much lasting damage. That’s probably wishful thinking, but what seems clear is that the normally friendly and community-oriented Mullenweg is willing to go—as WP Engine puts it in its cease-and-desist letter—”scorched earth nuclear” in his efforts to purge the WordPress ecosystem of those he sees as thumbing their noses at open source’s tenets. It is apparently especially galling to him when the offender is a competitor nearly as large and successful as Automattic itself.

Some are leaving WordPress entirely. Cernak of Northstar Digital Design has already decided to abandon WordPress (and WP Engine) for a much smaller, rival website-development platform called WebFlow. “I can’t depend on WordPress if Matt is going to make changes based on whatever he happens to want at the time,” he says.

When I ask Mullenweg if he is feeling traumatized by the pervasive criticism, he tells me about the time he was playing in a Little League game when his teammates saw, through his thin white pants, that his underwear had cartoon characters on them. “They started laughing. That was traumatic for me. But now it’s a funny story,” he recalls. “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.”

Whether or not anything about the current crisis ever seems funny to him, he insists it will all end up as a beneficial experience. “The best things come out of adversity and clashes,” he says. “We’re going to come out of it way stronger.”

Unless, that is, Mullenweg and his WordPress empire come out of it way weaker.

Technically, anyone can take WordPress and turn it into a new open-source program with a different name and a different BDFL, just as Mullenweg did with B2. Mullenweg has always promoted that freedom as the ultimate protection against, well, him. If you don’t like his stewardship, then fork off.

“I like to say that WordPress belongs just as much to you as it does to me,” he explains. “Which is kind of a beautiful concept. If I wake up tomorrow and decide to change something about the software that’s not aligned with your needs, guess what? You can fork it. It’s kind of like a bloodless revolution.”

There are plenty of rumbles in the WordPress community about doing just that, or finding some other way to pressure Mullenweg to relinquish his tight control. In a prepared statement emailed to Inc., a WP Engine spokesperson said that “we are encouraged by and supportive of the ideas we see being shared by leaders within WordPress and adjacent open-source platforms to reimagine how key elements of the WordPress ecosystem are governed and funded.” It is a clear plug for pushing Mullenweg out of his BDFLship.

On December 10, the California district court’s preliminary injunction handed WP Engine at least a temporary victory by ordering Automattic to stop blocking its rival’s access to WordPress.org and to undo its hijacking of the ACF plugin.

After the preliminary injunction was issued, screenshots posted on social media indicated that an obviously distressed Mullenweg had taken to the Slack channel Post Status, a popular messaging platform for the WordPress community. “It’s hard to imagine wanting to continue to working [sic] on WordPress after this,” Mullenweg posted, referring to the injunction. According to some accounts, he then took steps to delete his account on the channel.

It would be surprising if Mullenweg decided to voluntarily exit the world that he largely built and—injunction aside—continues to tightly control. He might attempt a self-coup, which could involve his forking WordPress into a new version of the software that would presumably be swept free of WP Engine and others deemed to be “takers.”

More likely, though, is that Mullenweg will stay the course. He implied as much in an email to Inc. from Mullenweg’s email account sent hours after his Post Status rant. “It’s disappointing to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive [sic] as WP Engine,” read the note. “However this return to status quo isn’t too big a deal, and I look forward to a jury taking a look at the case more deeply.”

In the meantime, Mullenweg will likely continue his reign. Automattic’s toilet paper will continue to be luxurious. But what of the stability and accessibility of WordPress? Every business that depends on the platform will surely wonder, from this point on, whether Mullenweg will lean in the direction of dictatorship or benevolence.

Editor’s note: Following publication, Matt Mullenweg responded on his blog, criticizing various aspects of this article. Having reviewed his criticism, we have made a few clarifying changes. While annual revenue is often used as a shorthand for business size, we have further clarified Automattic’s and WP Engine’s estimated annual revenue figures, which are distinct from their valuations. We have also clarified ownership of WordPress trademarks, updated Automattic’s employee count, and corrected the length of time it took Mullenweg to create WordPress. Inc. stands by the reporting and fact-checking in this article.