On the occasion of WordPress’ 23rd anniversary, Matt Mullenweg published an emotional blog post on WordPress.org reflecting on the ongoing legal conflict with WP Engine and private equity firm Silver Lake.
A Dispute That Began at WordCamp US 2024
The conflict traces back to Mullenweg’s keynote address at WordCamp US 2024 on September 21, 2024, where he publicly accused WP Engine and Silver Lake of profiting from WordPress while contributing insufficiently to the open-source project. It was later revealed that Automattic had requested WP Engine pay an 8% trademark licensing fee. WP Engine was then banned from WordPress.org access, and their Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin was forked into a new plugin, Secure Custom Fields
In October 2024, WP Engine filed a lawsuit against Mullenweg and Automattic. Automattic later countersued, accusing WP Engine of trademark infringement. In December, following the court’s granting of a preliminary injunction, ACF plugin was returned to WP Engine and their access to WordPress.org restored.
In the anniversary post, Mullenweg said the ongoing litigation had negatively affected development efforts surrounding WordPress 7.0. He wrote that “the release was not what I hoped it would be because so much time from key people was taken away by WP Engine’s attacks.”
Early this month, Mullenweg decided against shipping real-time collaboration in WordPress 7.0 citing “the surface area, race conditions, server load, memory efficiency, and the bugs that keep popping up in fuzz tests / etc don’t give me a lot of confidence on our current approach being the robust one we want to support.”
He also pointed to WP Engine issue as one of the causes, “there’s also the added burden right now of the WP Engine lawfare and depositions being a time DoS for critical people, perhaps without that in the background we could have gotten to a better place by now, but I don’t think with the current deposition schedule and all the faff around discovery we’re able to support this feature.”
Reflecting on his original WordCamp US presentation, Mullenweg described it as “a stupid presentation I gave at WordCamp US 2024 about how private equity can hollow out high-trust-based Open Source communities.”
Strong Criticism of WP Engine’s Legal Strategy
Mullenweg sharply criticized WP Engine’s legal counsel, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart, describing him as a “shoggoth” — referencing the fictional creature in the Cthulhu Mythos — and accusing him of engaging in “paperclip-maximizing legal torture.”
He further claimed the legal effort was attempting to dissolve the WordPress Foundation, which he described as a nonprofit entity with no employees or payroll that exists to support WordCamps and open-source education.
In one of the post’s most emotional sections, Mullenweg pleaded for an end to the legal battle:
If you know anyone at Silver Lake, Quinn Emanuel, or WP Engine in that order, please beg, plead with them to stop the violence. End this internecine warfare that is threatening to destroy one of the last stalwarts of the Open Web. It’s not fun and games anymore, not just business. This is having a real impact on people’s lives.
He added:
If you don’t know anyone at these entities, please pray, meditate, and call on whatever forces or divine interventions you can to bring this to an end.
Mullenweg also claimed he had attempted reconciliation efforts, saying he attended two meditation sessions “with open arms” and extended “every olive branch” possible. He alleged that WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner refused to meet him in person despite being “20 feet away.”
Early last year, Mullenweg had tweeted, “The lawsuits will go years and could potentially bankrupt me or force the closure of http://WordPress.org. It also takes a huge amount of time — there is no “lawyers work on that.”
A Personal Appeal to Silver Lake
The post concluded with a direct passionate message to Silver Lake, in which Mullenweg described the toll the conflict has taken on his personal life.
He wrote:
Silver Lake, you have already extracted all your pounds of flesh. I missed my Mom’s knee surgery. If you wanted me to suffer for my sins, I have, and probably deeper than you will ever know. WordPress and WordPress.org, and yes, even my flawed leadership, are at the heart of what has made WP Engine successful so far. You have so much money and power, you just got TikTok, the Trump administration loves you, you don’t need to control and take over WordPress, too. If you win, you destroy it, and then what? Please have mercy and stop trying to ruin people’s lives. You’ve won. I submit. Let’s move on.
Sharing the blog post on X, Mullenweg wrote: “I have held my tongue for 15 months, but I can’t abide or normalize the legal violence that @wpengine is inflicting anymore.”
In the #Announcements channel on the WordPress Slack workspace, Mullenweg wrote, “I’m so sorry for this.” and linked to the post.
In the #Ranting Slack channel, he also shared “I would settle if I could” and claimed settlement attempts had failed because WP Engine “doesn’t want to settle” and instead seeks to continue leveraging the WordPress trademark dispute for competitive advantage.
Mullenweg alleged the prolonged litigation was financially irrational, arguing that “any other rational / normal business would have been out of this situation long ago,” while suggesting private equity incentives and executive motivations were driving the dispute forward.
He also expressed frustration that WP Engine — which he described as one of the few companies focused entirely on WordPress hosting — had allegedly filtered his blog posts from dashboards, disrupted client sites, and hidden community and meetup information.
Migration Tracker Continues to Monitor Departures
Meanwhile, the “WP Engine Tracker” website remains live and reports that approximately 145,900 websites have migrated away from WP Engine since September 21, 2024.
According to the tracker, the top destinations for those websites include Pressable, an Automattic-owned hosting provider, along with Kinsta and DigitalOcean.
Community Reactions Remain Divided
The post triggered strong reactions across the WordPress community.
Developer Daniel Hayes Smith challenged Mullenweg’s claim that he had “held his tongue,” pointing out that Mullenweg had publicly discussed the dispute in interviews, blog posts, and social media posts throughout the past year. Mullenweg responded by saying he had actually restrained himself and continued trying to remain “factual and conciliatory.”
Shahjahan Jewel, the founder of WPManageNinja defended Mullenweg: “WordPress happened because, Matt refused to be greedy. Imagine if it had been run by a private equity firm optimizing for extraction. Or by the plugin empires built on dark patterns and upsells. We didn’t get that. We got something with a soul.”
Meanwhile, the founder of Mongoose Marketplace Cameron Jones posted a blunt reaction, “The dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed.”
WordPress developer and designer Jon Schroeder criticized the decision to publish the post during ongoing litigation, writing: “This is deeply unwise during a lawsuit. Saying literally anything is deeply unwise during a lawsuit. When the lawsuit is about one party using wordpress.org to hurt the other, posting about other party on .org during the lawsuit is beyond the pale.”
Founder & CEO of Virfice, Rayhan Arif, tweeted, “Enough is enough, dear @wpengine, @automattic, and @photomatt. Please end this, whatever stage it is at now, no matter who benefits more. Please end this for the sake of the open web and WordPress. Let bygones be bygones. Let’s move forward.”
Creative developer and designer David Solheim tweeted, “Honestly your position on the WP issue pushed me away from WordPress and I haven’t recommended it in about 2 years because I as a vendor need to trust the people leading the software I recommend.”
Devin Walker, team lead of Jetpack tweeted what’s on everyones minds, “For the sake of WordPress, open source, and the future of the ecosystem, I hope this gets resolved in a way that doesn’t leave the project, the people, and the teams completely damaged by the outcome.”
Founder and CEO of Barn2Plugins Katie Keith tweeted, “I feel torn because I don’t want the project, the ecosystem and the people to be completely damaged by the outcome, but at the same time I firmly believe that this entire situation was caused by that “stupid presentation” and was entirely foreseeable and avoidable.”
The case is currently scheduled to go before a jury in September 2027.