Who is Matt Mullenweg?

Matt Mullenweg is a founding developer of WordPress and the founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Tumblr, and Gravatar, among others.

Mullenweg worked alongside Mike Little to build the original version of WordPress in 2003, as a fork of the b2 blogging software. WordPress has since become the most popular blogging platform and CMS in the world, used by 41.2% of all websites, per W3Techs (August 2026).

Early life and career

Mullenweg was born on January 11, 1984, in Houston, Texas. He studied philosophy and political science at the University of Houston, then dropped out in 2004 for a job at CNET in San Francisco.

He left CNET in late 2005 to found Automattic. Toni Schneider served as Automattic’s CEO for its first 8 years while Mullenweg focused on product, and Mullenweg took the CEO role back in January 2014. He still holds it: the WordCamp Europe 2026 program bills him as Automattic’s founder and CEO. Each year he also delivers State of the Word, the keynote that sets the WordPress project’s direction. That’s why this one person matters to millions of site owners: his roadmap becomes the roadmap for the 2 in 5 websites that run WordPress.

Automattic at a glance

Automattic has been remote-first since its founding in 2005. As of August 2026, the company’s About page counts 1,441 employees speaking 108 languages and reports earning half a billion US dollars in annual revenue, while Mullenweg’s personal site says they work from more than 80 countries with no physical headquarters. Key milestones:

• 2005: Founded by Mullenweg after he left CNET
• 2015: Acquired WooCommerce, the ecommerce plugin used on 19.8% of all sites that run WordPress, per W3Techs (August 2026)
• 2019: Acquired Tumblr, the blogging and social network
• 2021: Acquired the podcast app Pocket Casts
• 2024: Acquired the messaging app Beeper

Who controls WordPress?

Although Automattic operates WordPress.com, it doesn’t own the open source WordPress software. Control is split across three entities, and Mullenweg leads all three:

• Automattic is the commercial arm. It holds the exclusive commercial license to the WordPress trademark, which lets it charge other companies that use the name commercially.
• The WordPress Foundation is the nonprofit that owns the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks.
• WordPress.org is the website that distributes the software and hosts the plugin and theme directories. Mullenweg owns it personally, as he told The Verge in October 2024: “WordPress.org just belongs to me personally.”

That last point is the practical one. WordPress.org is the update and plugin pipeline every self-hosted WordPress site depends on, so the person who owns it decides who gets access to it.