Matt Mullenweg Now Says That the Contribution Option of His Extortion Demand Was Added Because He Thought He Would Be Exposed
In late September, when WP Engine originally exposed through a cease and desist letter that Matt Mullenweg attacks on them was part of an extortion campaign against them, he almost immediately admitted to the extortion demand on Reddit. It was an odd response. But his defense seemed to be that he wasn’t just asking for money to be paid to his for-profit company, Automattic. He always provided the option to donate employee time to WordPress, “They had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above.” It turned out that the option to donate time came with some serious caveats, including that the donated time would be spent on work apparently at his personal direction:
Commit 8% of its revenue in the form of salaries of WP Engine employees working on WordPress
core features and functionality to be directed by WordPress.org. WP Engine will provide Automattic
a detailed monthly report demonstrating its fulfillment of this commitment. WordPress.org and
Automattic will have full audit rights, including access to employee records and time-tracking
WordPress.org is used as a euphemism he uses to refer to his personal ownership of WordPress.
In an interview last week at TechCrunch Disrupt with TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos, she asked him about the extortion demand. Part of his response was to say that he included that contribution element because he thought they might expose the extortion attempt, “I knew they were going to weaponize this and publish it, so I wanted to say it’s not just about the money.”
At times since this all went public, he has claimed that what he was doing was actually about trying to get WP Engine to contribute more:
“The analogy I made is they got Al Capone for taxes,” Mullenweg says. “So, if a company was making half a billion dollars from WordPress and contributing back about $100,000 a year, yes, I would be trying to get them to contribute more.”
That is in direct disagreement with him having added the contribution option because he thought his extortion attempt would be exposed.