Mar 2, 2025 · 1h 34m · lennys-podcast
Matt Mullenweg on the future of open source and why he’s taking a stand
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In an extensive interview with Lenny Rachitsky, Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg addresses the high-stakes legal and philosophical battle with WP Engine, champions the principles of the General Public License, and outlines Automattic's long-term business and AI strategy.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 3.9 Guest teaching 4.1 Guest disagreement 2.8 Lenny pushing back 2.0
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 41:20 Matt accuses WP Engine of shipping a bastardized product
Matt aggressively condemns WP Engine and Silver Lake for disabling WordPress revisions to save database space while charging customers under a diluted brand.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 1:25:10 Lenny questions Matt's critique of private equity vs AutomatticLenny directly confronts Matt with a pointed question on how Automattic firing staff and restructuring Tumblr differs from the PE tactics Matt rails against.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:00:10 Matt educates on trademark division and IRS limitationsMatt explains the complex legal and historical nuances behind WordPress's tripartite trademark ownership between the foundation and Automattic after IRS 501(c)(3) rejections.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 56:50 Lenny synthesizes the three core grievances against WP EngineLenny demonstrates sharp domain grasp by cleanly summarizing the complex legal, trademark, and open-source contribution issues driving the conflict.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Episode Preview: Matt Mullenweg on Open Source Battles and WP Engine | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Monologue teaser and episode introduction highlighting upcoming discussions around Matt's recent controversies with WP Engine. | |
| Sponsor Break: WorkOS Enterprise Authentication and Authorization | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Sponsor ad reads for WorkOS and Vanta featuring a brief interview snippet with Christina Cacioppo. | |
| Matt Mullenweg’s Career, Automattic Portfolio, and Global Scale | 5 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Matt outlines Automattic's portfolio and remote-first structure; Lenny demonstrates background knowledge by citing market share statistics like 43% of the internet running on WordPress. | |
| The Bay Lights Project and San Francisco Civic Philanthropy | 3 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Matt details his civic philanthropy and financial backing of the Bay Lights bridge installation in San Francisco. | |
| The Philosophical Origins of Matt's Open Source Convictions | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Matt shares his background in economics, jazz, and the philosophical underpinnings of the GPL license and four core software freedoms. | |
| Artificial Intelligence, Meta's Llama, and Open-Washing | 4 | 6 | 5 | 2 | Matt criticizes Meta's Llama licensing as 'fake open source' due to commercial user thresholds and European regulatory posturing. | |
| Open Source as the Bedrock of Humanity and Community Contribution | 3 | 4 | 2 | 0 | Matt evangelizes contributing to open source, noting that open code forms the fundamental training data and infrastructure of computing. | |
| AI Coding Agents, Security Automation, and Software Maintenance | 4 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Discussion of AI code agents like Devin, automated security scanning for plugins, and the lifelong burden of software maintenance. | |
| Building Movements vs. Platforms and Preventing Rug-Pulls | 4 | 5 | 4 | 1 | Matt differentiates true open source ecosystems from proprietary corporate platforms that rug-pull successful third-party developers. | |
| The WP Engine Conflict, Silver Lake, and WordCamp US Speech | 5 | 4 | 7 | 2 | Matt details the escalation with WP Engine and Silver Lake, accusing them of trademark abuse, breaking revision history, and dishonest negotiation. | |
| Sponsor Break: Loom Asynchronous Video Messaging | 4 | 4 | 5 | 3 | Following the Loom sponsor break, Matt details the fallout from his WordCamp speech, legal battles, and why public pushback was necessary. | |
| Addressing Platform Stability and the Tripartite Trademark Structure | 6 | 7 | 3 | 5 | Lenny presses on trademark ownership and platform stability concerns; Matt clarifies the tripartite non-profit foundation structure and IRS limits. | |
| Open Source Governance: Benevolent Dictator vs. Committee Management | 5 | 6 | 5 | 4 | Matt defends the benevolent dictator model in open source over design-by-committee, pointing to hard bets like Gutenberg. | |
| The Advanced Custom Fields Fork and Secure Custom Fields | 6 | 6 | 4 | 6 | Lenny pushes Matt directly on taking over and forking the Advanced Custom Fields plugin into Secure Custom Fields. | |
| Social Media Outrage, Algorithmic Incentives, and Open Dialogue | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Matt reflects on negative social media feedback, algorithmic outrage incentives, and sentiment distribution across platforms. | |
| Automattic's Tumblr Acquisition and the Complexities of Social Networks | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Matt describes acquiring Tumblr for $3M, managing its legacy liabilities, and orchestrating the massive backend migration to WordPress. | |
| M&A Strategy: Comparing Automattic’s Approach to Private Equity | 7 | 5 | 4 | 7 | Lenny puts Matt in the hot seat, asking how Automattic's restructuring of Tumblr differs from the private equity playbook Matt condemns. | |
| Future Projects, Beeper Messaging, Personal Pursuits, and Automattic Hiring | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Wrap-up covering the Beeper messaging platform beta, travel routines, photography, and global equal-pay hiring at Automattic. |
Statements from this episode (38)
Mullenweg: WordPress powers over 40% of websites, ten times second-place Shopify
“Now WordPress has grown to be, yeah, over 40% of all websites in the world, which is 10 x to number two, which right now is Shopify.”
Mullenweg mortgaged his condo to donate over $1M to Bay Lights
“I actually mortgaged my condo and donated the last million, million and a half to finish out that project.”
Mullenweg: American Founding Fathers would be open-source advocates today
“Open source was actually the most important idea of our generation. So if, like, if the founding fathers were around today, I think they would be open source advocates.”
Mullenweg: Fundamental software freedoms are required for true human freedom
“If you think about it, as more and more of our lives are influenced and actually controlled by the software we use if we don't have fundamental freedoms attached to that software, we're not truly free.”
Mullenweg notes WordPress started as a fork of abandoned project b2
“WordPress was actually a fork of abandoned open source project called B two.”
Mullenweg: Meta's Llama isn't truly open source due to user restrictions
“However, there's a clause in it that says, if you're above a certain threshold of monthly active users, I forget what it is, like, it's big, it's like seven hundred fifty million, so it's pretty high. You need a license from them. And so that does not give you…”
Mullenweg: WordPress community forced Meta to reverse restrictive React licensing
“I think it was React that they were doing something with the licensing or like a patent restriction on. And the WordPress community actually got Meta to change that and reverse something they were doing to lock it down.”
Mullenweg predicts proprietary software utility will approach zero within 100 years
“And if you fast forward like 50 or a hundred years, I do believe that the utility of proprietary software eventually approaches zero. So like when we're sending people to Mars, the operating system of the rockets and the devices and everything like that is not…”
Mullenweg predicts AI-assisted code will approach a majority within five years
“I don't know how much of WordPress's code right now is AI assisted or something like that. But I think over the next five years, it definitely approaches maybe a majority.”
Mullenweg claims WordPress Core hasn't had a remote exploit in years
“You know, we haven't had a remote exploit in, you know, knock on wood, like I think five years, six years or something.”
Mullenweg: WordPress's 60,000 plugins are its moat, not core CMS features
“You know, the core features of a CMS, you can kind of write with a few developers in a few weeks or something. Like it's kind of not, you know, it's basically correct operations. But to replicate those 60,000 plugins and themes, gosh, no one's done it. It's a …”
Mullenweg: Shopify and Facebook are not true platforms, will rug-pull developers
“And proprietary services can create platforms. You know, Shopify has a third party ecosystem and things like that. But it's never a true platform. And not a true platform. It's when your ecosystem makes more money than the core does. And so many times, whether…”
Mullenweg: True platform freedom only exists when building on open source
“And again, you don't have freedom unless you're building on open source. That's why more and more companies and people are choosing if they're gonna build a business on top of something else, if you build on an open source, you have that guarantee. Even if you…”
Mullenweg: WP Engine hosts approximately 700,000 WordPress installations
“It has about 700,000 WordPress installs. There's a company called WP Engine.”
Mullenweg claims WP Engine broke WordPress undo feature to save money
“So to save money, they were actually turning off features like revisions. So a cool part about WordPress that actually one of my favorite features is every change to every single post or page is saved forever, just like Wikipedia. So if you make a mistake, you…”
Mullenweg: Silver Lake failed to sell WP Engine over IP concerns
“Last year, they tried to sell the company. So private equity usually holds things for like five to seven years. So they were kind of five years into this. They tried to shop it around and sell it. They weren't able to find a buyer. They said, well, they don't …”
Mullenweg claims WP Engine spends millions monthly on lawyers and PR
“And also, you know, they're spending millions of dollars a month on both lawyers and PR.”
Mullenweg: Open source leaders must fight exploiters to avoid ecosystem destruction
“You know, one thing if you're really open and open source, sometimes you have to stand up the bullies and you have to fight to protect your open source ideals. Otherwise people could take advantage of it in a way that ultimately can destroy everything you've c…”
Mullenweg claims WP Engine called itself 'WordPress Engine' in client meetings
“They would refer to themselves as WordPress engine and client meetings and other things.”
Mullenweg claims 98% of WordPress core developers remained despite public dispute
“98% of all the core developers have stayed and contributed and are working on the next version and are supportive”
Mullenweg clarifies he has always personally owned and controlled WordPress.org
“WordPress.org has always been me personally.”
Mullenweg: IRS denied original application for WordPress.org nonprofit status
“And we applied for that originally, and it was denied by the IRS. So we actually weren't able to put WordPress.org or the software itself under the nonprofit.”
Mullenweg details the complex commercial and non-commercial WordPress trademark licenses
“And so kind of the compromise is that the foundation would kind of, ah, own the trademark and license it out for non-commercial purposes. I had a license to run WordPress.org, you know, because obviously I need that, and then Automatic would retain the commerc…”
Mullenweg claims no board-governed open source project matches WordPress's success
“And there are other open source projects that have this structure. None of them have been successful as WordPress.”
Mullenweg claims Gutenberg block editor usage is now bigger than WordPress
“Gutenberg is a huge part of why WordPress is relevant today. And it's actually an open source project we do. It's the block editor. It's actually bigger than WordPress. You know, because it's not just used on WordPress. It's used on every WordPress site, but a…”
Mullenweg plans to hand WordPress to a single successor, not committee
“If or when I'm gone, I don't want to pass it to a committee. I want to pass it to someone else who can, you know, have a role similar to mine, and really sort of, ah, try to be a steward.”
Mullenweg: WordPress.com has introduced over 100 million users to WordPress
“WordPress.com, having a free version of WordPress that has introduced, you know, over a hundred million people to the software in a way that you could just sign up for free.”
Mullenweg acknowledges judge reversed Advanced Custom Fields plugin repository takeover
“This is controversial and actually the, they actually got a preliminary injection. So the judge said reverse this. So this has all been reversed by the way.”
Mullenweg: Internal sentiment analysis showed 52% negative reaction on Twitter
“We ran a sentiment analysis recently. We were kind of like looking at different social networks, analyzing all the comments, and we found actually that the negative, you know, the sort of devil horn fraction on like what was it? Like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instag…”
Mullenweg claims WP Engine refuses podcast, press, or journalist inquiries
“WP Engine has not done any podcasts and no press. They don't respond to journalists. They don't talk about this.”
Mullenweg: Leaders in the right should speak publicly, not just use lawyers
“When you're in the wrong, you probably say, only have the lawyers talk. When you're in the right, like, you know, I think you should be out there and tell the story.”
Mullenweg confirms Automattic acquired Tumblr for roughly $3 million
“Automatic ended up buying it for a de minimis amount. I think it's been reported. We bought it for like three million dollars.”
Automattic is migrating 500 million Tumblr sites to run on WordPress
“Actually we're in the process right now of migrating the half a billion Tumblr sites to WordPress. Probably one of the largest data migrations.”
Mullenweg admits Tumblr remains unprofitable and subsidized by Automattic
“Still not still not profitable, so we're still subsidizing it from the rest of Automatic's businesses”
Mullenweg: Automattic replaced 85% to 90% of Tumblr's team after acquisition
“Tumblr, I think we ended up ultimately replacing like, 85, 90% of the team as well.”
Mullenweg: Automattic generates roughly $500M annually, mostly from WooCommerce
“Automatic makes about half a billion dollars a year now, and WooCommerce is a majority of that.”
Automattic expands core mission to messaging with upcoming Beeper relaunch
“You know, I have these life missions to democratize publishing and commerce. We added a new one last year, which is messaging. So it's in beta mode right now, but relaunching in a few months is a product called Beeper, which takes all your Telegram, Instagram …”