It does sound as if he has lost his grip on reality.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.”
And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.
I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.
Matt is Automattic's CEO.... I see what you're doing... ;)
We/I want to build useful things. This is a distraction. I believe Automattic is a net benefit for the web and look forward to having more focus to continue delivering on that. Internally, were focused on that.
Sounds like you've never worked for a CEO with "ideas." One time a CEO made the whole R&D team switch to "aspect oriented programming" because he had read a blog post. Another time we had to switch to C# because he had heard it wad better than Java.
I worked for a company with co-CEOs. The ideas CEO left and the company tanked. I think there's a right way to have an ideas CEO but maybe a balance helps keep them from switching everybody to C# on a whim. A CEO without ideas seems like a recipe for at best stagnation and at worse just fleecing the company of value and taking a golden parachute.
We need to go back to a time when a CEO 'trolling' or acting like this would be career suicide. It seems like half of the biggest tech companies are run by people with the emotional and social intelligence of 3 years olds.
The additional reporting at [0] about his alleged behaviour in internal channels along with his public posts on social media really reinforces this same feeling for me:
> “oh, since I’m a pirate now, I fucking curse. after 42 years of never uttering a curse word, it’s kinda fucking fun. if this is a HR problem @caron please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with @Mark Davies.” […] Mullenweg also posted that the Automattic Slack “smells funny, like turncoats” and said he was going to hang out in the WordPress.org Slack instead.
I’ve been around the WP crowd enough to know countless stories that prove mm is basically a manual case of narcissistic personality disorder.
The reality shifting, the constant blaming, the unsubstantiated claims… they could put his picture on the DSM5 definition of the disorder.
The problem with these personalities is that they are untreatable and tend to get way worse with power/money.
He is an utter and catastrophic disgrace to the whole wordpress community and the only hope is that he gets to be successfully ousted.
They are not necessarily untreatable but to be treatable they need to realize and admit they have an issue, which is unlikely and gets even less likely if they are financially successful.
Would be nice if Tesla, SpaceX, Cursor, former Twitter all rotted with their stock prices plunging to zero, but fElon fanpeople and the AI sheep still only posting on former Twitter will keep them afloat.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.”
And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.