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Matthew Charles Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984) is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is known as a co-founder of the free and open-source web publishing software WordPress, and the founder of Automattic.
In March 2003, he co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group (GMPG) with Eric A. Meyer and Tantek Çelik. In April 2004, he helped launch Ping-O-Matic, a mechanism for notifying about blog updates.
In October 2004, he was hired by CNET who would allow him to develop WordPress part-time as part of his job. He dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco for the position.
In January 2014, Mullenweg resumed the role of CEO, replacing Schneider. He led Automattic's expansion and a series of acquisitions, including WooCommerce in 2015, The Atavist Magazine in 2018, Tumblr in 2019, Pocket Casts in 2021, and Beeper in 2024. Mullenweg received the Heinz Awards for Technology, the Economy and Employment in 2016, for "helping to democratize online publishing".
Automattic's valuation reached $7.5 billion in 2021. At the time, WordPress hosted 28 million websites, or 40 percent of all websites on the Internet.
In 2008, shortly before WordPress 2.5's release, Six Apart's Movable Type published "A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide"—a comparison of their CMS with their rival, WordPress—as a company blog article that Mullenweg characterized as "desperate and dirty". In 2013, developers on the digital marketplace Envato were banned from speaking at WordPress events after he criticized the platform for selling WordPress themes with the graphics and CSS components under a proprietary license instead of the GPL.
In 2016, Mullenweg accused Wix.com, a competitor to WordPress.com, of reusing WordPress's mobile text editor code in Wix's own mobile app without adhering to the terms of the GPL. Despite the license's requirement to publish anything built with GPL code under the GPL, Wix's CEO claimed that the company open-sourced their forked version of the component and satisfied the license's terms before the app switched to its own fork of the MIT License text editor that the WordPress editor was based upon. The new fork added a clause to the MIT license that forbids redistribution under any other license.
In 2022, Mullenweg criticized GoDaddy for not reinvesting in the WordPress project sufficiently.
On January 9, 2025, the representative of the WordPress Sustainability team, Thijs Buijs, resigned via WordPress.org’s Slack channel, citing dissatisfaction with Matt Mullenweg’s December 24, 2024, Reddit post titled “What drama should I create in 2025?” highlighting concerns about what he described as “unsustainable leadership”. In response, Matt Mullenweg thanked Thijs Buijs for reminding him of the existence of a sustainability team, announced its disbanding, and subsequently closed Wordpress.org's #sustainability Slack channel.
, the company lists investments in companies such as CoinDesk, MakerBot, Sonos, SpaceX, Ring, as well as software companies including Calm, Chartbeat, DailyBurn, Memrise, Genius, Nord Security and Telegram. It has also funded startups that provide services to web developers including Creative Market, GitLab, Npm, SendGrid, Stripe and Typekit. From 2017 to 2019, Mullenweg also served as a board member for GitLab.
Mullenweg has employed a team of contributors to WordPress through Audrey Capital since 2010, who work separately from Automattic.
On the 20th anniversary of WordPress' initial release, Mullenweg announced a scholarship program aimed at the children of significant contributors to open-source projects.
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