Hacker News Reader

It's not about what WP Engine could have done, but how Matt acted. If he wanted WPE to use their own Plugin repository, he could have told them so and given them a date. But cutting off access to updates without warning to all these sites is inexcusable. Matt chose the "nuclear option" without realizing that the fallout would also hit WordPress and himself. In addition to hundreds of thousands of websites that had nothing to do with his gripes.

View on HN

From the lawsuit:

In a social media post on the platform X, he boasted that as a result of his actions, WPE is now a “distressed asset,” worth just a “fraction” of what it was before, because “[c]ustomers are leaving in droves” – calling into question whether Defendants’ motivations extend beyond mere interference and extortion, and are in fact a thinly disguised attempt to artificially drive down WPE’s valuation in hopes of acquiring it on the cheap

Its not unlikely that the gameplan all along was slander and disrupt them so much that the company would become worthless, then acquire it. He was trying to blackmail/extort WPE's CEO into coming to work for him, after all! (text message screenshots are in the lawsuit too)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com