Why Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg went to war over WordPress
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Cheers. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automatic, the parent company of WordPress.com, Tumblr, and a whole host of other products, like the new cross-platform messaging service, Beeper. This is Matt's third time on Decoder.
Back in 2022, we had him on twice, first to talk about Automatic and WordPress broadly, and then to talk about Tumblr and the future of social networking. He's back now because Automatic just turned 20, and I really wanted to talk about what the next 20 years of running one of the most dominant platforms on the web might look like, as changes to search and AI threatened to change everything in their wake, and various lawsuits threatened to change the nature of WordPress itself. And make no mistake, WordPress is one of the most dominant platforms on the web, if not the most dominant. Something like 43% of websites run on WordPress in one of its many flavors. That includes The Verge, the back end of our website is WordPress, hosted by WordPress VIP.
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