WordPress’s Mullenweg Puts Lipstick on His WP Engine Argument
You know what they say about lipstick on a pig…
About 50 minutes into the onstage interview that opened the day at Nerdearla on Saturday, just after Automattic’s CEO and WordPress’s co-founder Matt Mullenweg had finished telling his life story — and the story of WordPress — interviewer Ariel Jolo (who’s also the conference’s founder) asked Mullenweg to explain himself about WP Engine.
“I want to jump back two months ago,” Jolo said. “What happened?”
After that — other than a rather sudden run offstage by Mullenweg about a minute after the question was asked for an unplanned three-minute bathroom break — the conversation went about like anyone who’s been following recent events around Mullenweg and WordPress might expect.
In all, the answer to Jolo’s question took a little over a half-hour to flesh out, but we’re just going to look at the first 11 minutes or so, which in my estimation was longer than Mullenweg needed to hang himself.
“There’s a company called WP Engine which started in like 2013, and for five or six years did things in a really nice way,” Mullenweg began. “They contributed back to WordPress, they were kind of part of everything, but then they got bought by this private equity firm called Silver Lake, this 100 billion dollar firm that buys things, maximizes for profit, then sells it — they flip it.”