Comment by KennyBlanken

That's a lot of words from someone who doesn't know what's been going on for ~6 months or so that is relevant.

Mullenweg lost his mind and attacked a competitor to Wordpress hosting (WP Engine) and kept doubling down and only served to demonstrate how much of an unhinged asshole he was.

Along the way he pissed off the Wordpress community - the worry was that if anyone else pissed him off (which could include he'd accuse them of using the Wordpress name or even "WP", even if it was descriptive (which is entirely permitted use of a trademarked name) and run up a bunch of legal expenses for them.

Angry-at-the-world blog post after blog post doubling down over and over. Taunting people as he banned them from the Wordpress slack, that sort of stuff. Then he blocked WP Engine from accessing the Wordpress.org plugin and theme registries which meant a huge number of sites couldn't update plugins or themes.

Then he announced Automattic was going to cut back engineering hours to (if I remember right) one full time staffer. One person to keep up with security updates and bugfixes of a very complicated piece of software used by a lot of organization.

Incredibly childish and thoroughly demonstrated to the world that he was unsuited for leading a company and being the sole person almost completely in charge of a piece of software used by a 20-30% of the websites in the world.

This was absolutely foreseeable, especially when he cut back Automattic's engineering to 40hr/week.

I advised a client a few weeks into the drama to at least keep in the back of their minds that they might have to migrate at some point as "the CEO of the company is off his rocker, they probably will start to struggle with security updates, and the company may go out of business."