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Automattic founder, Matt Mullenweg

Source: Automattic

Matt Mullenweg, who turned 40 in January, has now spent more than half his life working on WordPress. He’s never had such an insane two weeks.

WordPress, best known as a leading content management system, has hundreds of millions of sites currently using its templates, tools and plugins. But the WordPress universe is a complicated mishmash of open-source products, nonprofits, for-profit companies, trademarks and licenses.

The typically quiet but extremely important part of the internet — WordPress powers roughly 40% of all websites — has suddenly emerged as a major source of tech industry drama, threatening to upend an ecosystem that’s long been viewed, from the outside at least, as collegial, thanks to its longevity and the various fun-loving camps and learning sessions it hosts every year.

While WordPress’ technology is open source, meaning anyone can install it and use it for free, Mullenweg is also founder and CEO of Automattic, a venture-backed startup valued at $7.5 billion, as of 2021. WordPress.com is Automattic’s central businesses, and individuals and companies pay anywhere from $4 a month to over $25,000 a year for services like ad products, security, customer support and inventory management.

The saga that burst into public view in September featured the normally mild-mannered Mullenweg as its central character in a battle with WP Engine, one of the leading providers of WordPress hosting. Silicon Valley private equity firm Silver Lake bought a majority stake in WP Engine in 2018, investing $250 million and obtaining three board seats.

“I’ve been doing WordPress for 21 years, I have good relationships with every other company in the world,” Mullenweg said in an interview this week with CNBC.

WP Engine’s offense, according to Mullenweg and a cease-and-desist letter his attorneys sent to the company on Sept. 23, revolves around years of trademark violations and WP Engine’s claim that it’s bringing “WordPress to the masses.”

“We at Automattic have been attempting to make a licensing deal with them for a very long time, and all they have done is string us along,” Mullenweg wrote in a Sept. 26 post on his personal website, ma.tt. “Finally, I drew a line in the sand, which they have now leapt over.”

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Since then, the matter has escalated on an almost daily basis. WordPress took the drastic step of banning WP Engine from using the WordPress resources necessary to serve its customers, which preceded a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by WP Engine against Mullenweg and Automattic. Mullenweg then put out another post, calling WP Engine’s suit “meritless,” and announcing that he’d hired Neal Katyal, former U.S. acting solicitor general, for legal defense.

Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist and founder of Theory Ventures, says the conflict speaks to the perpetual challenge of open-source software.

“What are the legitimate ways of monetizing open source and does the commercial entity created by the authors — how much control should they have with the commercialization efforts?” Tunguz said. In this case, “hundreds of millions in revenue is at stake between the two,” he added.

‘Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang’

In Mullenweg’s telling of the brouhaha, the battle has been years in the making. He’s been actively trying to strike a deal since January and finally got fed up, he said.

But to the outside world, it all felt very sudden. Mullenweg first referenced the matter in public on Sept. 17, in a blog post ahead of WordCamp, the largest annual gathering in the U.S. of WordPress users. The four-day event took place in Portland, Oregon, beginning on Sept. 17.

In the post, Mullenweg criticized WP Engine for not contributing enough back to the WordPress ecosystem. He said that Automattic contributed 3,786 hours per week to WordPress.org, (“not even counting me!”) compared to 47 hours for WP Engine.

For businesses and developers considering who they want to support, Mullenweg had this message: “Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital.”

A Silver Lake spokesperson said WP Engine was handling all inquiries. A WP Engine representative referred to the company’s complaint against Automattic and Mullenweg, filed on Oct. 2. The spokesperson highlighted the introduction of the complaint.

“This is a case about abuse of power, extortion, and greed,” the filing begins. “The misconduct at issue here is all the more shocking because it occurred in an unexpected place — the WordPress open source software community built on promises of the freedom to build, run, change, and redistribute without barriers or constraints, for all. Those promises were not kept, and that community was betrayed, by the wrongful acts of a few—[Matt Mullenweg and Automattic]—to the detriment of the many, including WPE.”

On Sept. 20, three days after Mullenweg’s initial post, the WordPress founder showed he wouldn’t be backing down.

In his keynote, at an event that attracted an estimated 1,500 WordPress fanatics, Mullenweg warned the audience upfront that it “might be one of my spiciest WordCamp presentations ever.” After reading out his prior blog post, Mullenweg took swipes at Silver Lake, even naming a partner at the firm, Lee Wittlinger, as the man behind WP Engine, comparing him to a “schoolyard bully.”

Prior to taking questions, Mullenweg said of WP Engine’s presence at WordCamp, “they’re not going to be at future ones, I don’t think.”

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He wasn’t done.

The next day, in a post titled, “WP Engine is not WordPress,” Mullenweg wrote that even his mother didn’t know the difference, and he said WP Engine is “profiting off of the confusion” and “needs a trademark license to continue their business.”

His mom wasn’t the only one confused.

Bob Perkowitz, president of environmental nonprofit ecoAmerica, told CNBC that he’s known Mullenweg for 16 years and is even an investor in Automattic. For a number of his organizational and personal websites, Perkowitz said he’s long been a WP Engine customer. Tuning in remotely, he heard Mullenweg’s WordCamp presentation.

“I always thought that was part of WordPress,” Perkowitz told CNBC in an interview, referring to WP Engine. “They’re misleading, and they don’t contribute to the community.”

Perkowitz said he’s having his website administrator migrate all of the websites to different hosting companies.

Following Mullenweg’s presentation, WP Engine sent Automattic’s legal chief a cease-and-desist letter on Sept. 23, due to what the company called Mullenweg’s self-described “scorched earth nuclear approach.” The letter said Mullenweg had demanded a payout of a “very large sum of money” before his WordCamp keynote, and WP Engine didn’t pay up.

The letter said Mullenweg’s “false, misleading, and disparaging statements are legally actionable.”

Two days later, Mullenweg wrote on the WordPress.org site that WP Engine had been banned, meaning it “no longer has free access to WordPress.org’s resources.” Mullenweg encouraged WP Engine’s thousands of customers to contact the company “and ask them to fix it.”

WordPress then temporarily unblocked WP Engine and gave it until Oct. 1 to agree to terms of a licensing agreement, which Mullenweg made public. The crux of the deal is that WP Engine would agree to a royalty fee of 8% of monthly revenue to Automattic or commit 8% of revenue “in the form of salaries of WP Engine employees” working on WordPress features for WordPress.org.

No deal was made. The ban went into effect Oct. 1.

To the universe of WP Engine customers, Mullenweg’s actions were harsh and clumsy. Mullenweg says that what his critics don’t understand is how long he’s been trying to come to a deal.

“They’ve been delaying forever,” Mullenweg told CNBC. He decided, “I’m going to finally start talking about the evil stuff you’re doing unless you talk to me,” he said.

Fighting back

Far from negotiating, WP Engine on Wednesday filed its explosive lawsuit against Mullenweg and Automattic.

WP Engine accuses Mullenweg of slander and libel due to his public comments and says the WordPress founder has numerous conflicts of interest in how he runs the community and his company, give the open-source nature of the technology.

“Over the last two weeks, Defendants have been carrying out a scheme to ban WPE from the WordPress community unless it agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars to Automattic for a purported trademark license that WPE does not even need,” the lawsuit says. “Defendants’ plan, which came without warning, gave WPE less than 48 hours to either agree to pay them off or face the consequences of being banned and publicly smeared.”

Following WP Engine’s demands for a jury trial in its 61-page lawsuit, Mullenweg fired back, describing the complaint as “baseless” and “flawed, start to finish.”

On his personal website, Mullenweg acknowledged that the ordeal was causing a big internal clash at his company.

“It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions,” Mullenweg wrote.

He says he made the decision to offer buyout packages for anyone who resigned before early afternoon Thursday, offering $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher. Anyone who took the deal wouldn’t be eligible to “boomerang,” a term for getting rehired.

Mullenweg said that 159 people, or 8.4% of the workforce, took the offer while the 91.6% who opted to stay turned down a collective $126 million.

Mullenweg concluded by saying, “now I feel much lighter.”

“I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay,” Mullenweg wrote. “As the kids say, LFG!”

Mullenweg may be openly enthusiastic and grateful for the employees he still has on board, but the WordPress community is a mess. Many WP Engine customers are suffering, and Automattic is gearing up for a legal fight against a private equity firm with over $100 billion in assets.

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Meta extends ban on new political ads past Election Day

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Meta extends ban on new political ads past Election Day

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg plans to visit South Korea, scheduling key meetings during the trip, according to a statement by Meta on Wednesday, which did not provide further details. Reportedly, Zuckerberg is anticipated to meet with Samsung Electronics chairman Jay Y. Lee later this month to discuss AI chip supply and other generative AI issues, as per the South Korean newspaper Seoul Economic Daily, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.

Alex Wong | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Meta extended its ban on new political ads on Facebook and Instagram past Election Day in the U.S.

The social media giant announced the political ads policy update on Monday, extending its ban on new political ads past Tuesday, the original end date for the restriction period.

Meta did not specify the day it will lift the restriction, saying only that the ad blocking will continue “until later this week.” The company did not say why it extended the political advertising restriction period.

The company announced in August that any political ads that ran at least once before Oct. 29 would still be allowed to run on Meta’s services in the final week before Election Day. Other political ads will not be allowed to run.

Organization with eligible ads will have “limited editing capabilities” while the restriction is still in place, Meta said. Those advertisers will be allowed to make scheduling, budgeting and bidding-related changes to their political ads, Meta said.

Meta enacted the same policy in 2020. The company said the policy is in place because “we recognize there may not be enough time to contest new claims made in ads.”

Google-parent Alphabet announced a similar ad policy update last month, saying it would pause ads relating to U.S. elections from running in the U.S. after the last polls close on Tuesday. Alphabet said it would notify advertisers when it lifts the pause.

Nearly $1 billion has been spent on political ads over the last week, with the bulk of the money spent on down-ballot races throughout the U.S., according to data from advertising analytics firm AdImpact.

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Jeff Bezos and OpenAI invest in robot startup Physical Intelligence at $2.4 billion valuation

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Jeff Bezos and OpenAI invest in robot startup Physical Intelligence at .4 billion valuation

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, January 18, 2024 (L), and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, November 2, 2021.

Reuters

Physical Intelligence, a robot startup based in San Francisco, has raised $400 million at a $2.4 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed Monday to CNBC.

Investors included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Thrive Capital and Lux Capital, a Physical Intelligence spokesperson said. Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital are also listed as investors on the company’s website.

Physical Intelligence’s new valuation is about six times that of its March seed round, which reportedly came in at $70 million with a $400 million valuation. Its current roster of employees includes alumni of Tesla, Google DeepMind and X.

The startup focuses on “bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world,” per its website, and it aims to do this by developing large-scale artificial intelligence models and algorithms to power robots. The startup spent the past eight months developing a “general-purpose” AI model for robots, the company wrote in a blog post. Physical Intelligence hopes that model will be the first step toward its ultimate goal of developing artificial general intelligence. AGI is a term used to describe AI technology that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks.

The news comes days after OpenAI launched a search feature within ChatGPT, its viral chatbot, that positions the AI startup to better compete with search engines like GoogleMicrosoft‘s Bing and Perplexity. Last month, OpenAI also closed its latest funding round at a valuation of $157 billion.

Physical Intelligence’s vision is that one day users can “simply ask robots to perform any task they want, just like they can ask large language models (LLMs) and chatbot assistants,” the startup wrote in the blog post. In case studies, Physical Intelligence details how its tech could allow a robot to do laundry, bus tables or assemble a box.

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Barry Diller calls timing of The Washington Post’s non-endorsement a ‘blunder’

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Barry Diller calls timing of The Washington Post's non-endorsement a 'blunder'

Watch CNBC's full interview with IAC and Expedia chairman Barry Diller

To Barry Diller, a friend of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the decision for The Washington Post not to endorse a candidate in tomorrow’s presidential election was “absolutely principled” — and poorly timed, he said Monday on CNBC’s Squawk Box.

“They made a blunder — it should’ve happened months before, and it didn’t, and that’s the issue with it,” Diller said.

Diller is chairperson of both online travel company Expedia and IAC, which owns media platforms and websites like Dotdash Meredith and Care.com. He and Bezos appear to have been close friends for years, with Diller and his wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, hosting Bezos’s engagement party to fiancee Lauren Sanchez.

The decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 race or for future presidential races came directly from Bezos, the paper’s owner, according to an article published by two of the Post’s own reporters.

The move prompted public condemnation from several staff writers, a flood of at least 250,000 digital subscription cancellations and the resignations of at least three editorial board members.

Bezos defended his position in his own op-ed late last month, calling the move a “meaningful step in the right direction” to restore low public trust in media and journalism.

“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos wrote, emphasizing that the decision to not endorse a candidate was made “entirely internally” and without consulting either campaign. “I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it.”

Diller said he spoke to Bezos following the decision.

“I think it was absolutely principled,” Diller said. “The mistake they made — and it was a mistake admitted by him — was timing.”

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