Matt Mullenweg

Matthew Charles Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984) is an American entrepreneur and web developer. He is known for developing WordPress and founding Automattic.

Early life and education
Mullenweg was born and raised in Houston, Texas. His father, Chuck, was a computer programmer. Mullenweg was raised Catholic. He attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, although he was frequently absent due to chronic migraines. After graduating from high school, he studied philosophy and political science at the University of Houston, eventually dropping out in 2004.

Early career
In January 2003, Mullenweg and Mike Little started WordPress as a fork of b2. They were soon joined by original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi. Mullenweg was 19 years old at the time. In March 2003, he co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group (GMPG) with Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik. In April 2004, he helped launch Ping-O-Matic, a mechanism for notifying search engines 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.

Automattic


Mullenweg left CNET in October 2005 to focus on WordPress full-time. Soon after he announced Akismet, an initiative to reduce comment and trackback spam. In December, he founded Automattic, with Akismet and managed web hosting service WordPress.com as its flagship products. In January 2006, Mullenweg recruited former Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider to join Automattic as CEO.



In January 2014, Mullenweg became CEO of Automattic. Schneider moved to work on new projects at Automattic. From 2017 to 2019, Mullenweg also served as a board member for GitLab, Inc.

Mullenweg, together with Naveen Selvadurai and Audrey Kim, runs the angel investment firm Audrey Capital, which has backed nearly 30 companies since 2008.

Mullenweg began a three-month sabbatical from his role as CEO at the beginning of February 2024. Later that month, Mullenweg engaged in a public feud with a transgender Tumblr user who, frustrated with the site's failure to address transphobic harassment, posted that she wished Mullenweg would die in a comedic way. The user was subsequently banned. Responding to user uproar, Mullenweg addressed the ban in posts on his personal Tumblr blog, in which he characterized the post as a death threat, and shared private account information about the user. Mullenweg also responded to individual commenters on Tumblr in posts and direct messages, and went to Twitter to respond to the banned user's tweets about the situation. A few days later, transgender employees of Tumblr and Automattic made a post on the official Tumblr staff blog characterizing his response as "unwarranted and harmful" and stating that he did not speak on their behalf. They also said that the user's post was not a realistic threat of violence and not the reason for her ban.

Philanthropy
Mullenweg sat on the board of non-profit magazine Grist.org. Mullenweg has supported the Apache Software Foundation, The Bay Lights, and Charity: Water.