Matt Mullenweg

Matthew Charles Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984) is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is known as a co-founder of the free and open-source web publishing software WordPress, and the founder of Automattic.

Mullenweg was born January 11, 1984, in Houston, Texas, to Chuck and Kathleen Mullenweg and grew up in the Willowbend neighborhood. His older sister was born in 1974. His father, who died in 2016, was a computer programmer who worked for Brown & Root, and encouraged his children to start using home computers at an early age. His mother was a stay-at-home mother. The Mullenwegs were raised Catholic. He attended Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, studying jazz and playing the saxophone. Mullenweg suffered from migraines as a child that forced him to miss extended periods of school. He attended the University of Houston for two years, studying philosophy and political science. He dropped out after his sophomore year in 2004 to work for CNET, which promised him that he could allocate time to the development of WordPress.

Mullenweg began blogging in 2002 on the open source platform b2. B2 developer Michael Valdrighi abandoned the project and Mullenweg took it over in 2003. He and Mike Little created a b2 fork that year they called WordPress and published it under the GNU General Public License.

In March 2003, he co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group (GMPG) with Eric A. 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.

After leaving CNET in 2005, Mullenweg founded Automattic as a fully distributed company. Toni Schneider was hired as CEO so Mullenweg could learn how to manage a large organization. During this period, Mullenweg focused on product development while Schneider managed the company.

In January 2014, Mullenweg resumed the role of CEO, replacing Schneider. He led Automattic's expansion and a series of acquisitions, including WooCommerce in 2015, The Atavist Magazine in 2018, Tumblr in 2019, Pocket Casts in 2021, and Beeper in 2024. Mullenweg received the Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment in 2016, for "helping to democratize online publishing".

Automattic's valuation reached $7.5 billion in 2021. At the time, WordPress hosted 28 million websites, or 40 percent of all websites on the Internet.