This will someday be an MBA case study on how to blunder a PR campaign.
WPEngine is _not_ a sympathetic character by default. They’re a decent hosting provider with an ambitious enterprise sales team…they have nowhere near the level of accumulated goodwill that WordPress had. It doesn’t take a genius press team to make them look like a playground bully.
Nothing that has happened over the past week has been executed well from a comms standpoint.
That’s why I want to ask…is Matt ok? Executives are people too, and his decisions make him seem very isolated. If he’s psychologically unwell, I hope he gets the help he needs. If he is ok, I hope he’s fired by the board tomorrow.
A couple months back Matt had a personal feud with a Tumblr user and proceeded to harass them across platforms which included posting their private account information on twitter in an inflammatory response (which he deleted some 15 minutes later after realizing the several laws he must've broken). This is his usual behavior.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...
> Matt [7:18]: "They [wp engine] fired a incident report against me that said I berated them and cursed at them in their [wordcamp] booth now if you ask anyone who knows me I actually don't curse like I don't use curse words at all and they put information out there saying that I told them to f off you know which is not true and there were witnesses there"
> Matt [23:19]: "um you know WP enginer is going to lose a lot of customers. Silver Lake stands to lose billions of dollars so they are going to pull out every dirty trick smear campaign Cambridge analytica stuff Palantir. They're going to try to attack and smear me and automattic wordpress. Working as much as possible so you know if you see terrible stuff about me coming out I
don't know like just know that there's probably someone paying for that um that's that's one thing I'll say"
Can't disagree, but the huge mistake started at “We generally do not comment on individual cases, but". A CEO recklessly copy pasting information from his platform's internal moderation portal into a public forum should really put into question their ability to stay level headed while running the business and the effectiveness of their company's policies and security practices. I genuinely cannot think of any other case this mind boggling.
> dies a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere
Full quote. This is ridiculous, and to me looks more than a little tongue in cheek.
Hoping for people's death isn't good, but this isn't a threat. It's an expression of frustration, and people think these things, and sometimes say them out loud. And there's a huge power imbalance here.
WPEngine is _not_ a sympathetic character by default. They’re a decent hosting provider with an ambitious enterprise sales team…they have nowhere near the level of accumulated goodwill that WordPress had. It doesn’t take a genius press team to make them look like a playground bully.
Nothing that has happened over the past week has been executed well from a comms standpoint.
That’s why I want to ask…is Matt ok? Executives are people too, and his decisions make him seem very isolated. If he’s psychologically unwell, I hope he gets the help he needs. If he is ok, I hope he’s fired by the board tomorrow.