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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

It does sound as if he has lost his grip on reality.

> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.”

And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.

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There's an episode of Archer where Archer and another dude have to battle to the death to determine who the new pirate king is.

Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat?

> Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat?

There is a Thunderdome at Burning Man.

https://journal.burningman.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Th...

Off topic, but the fact that that's a Wordpress link just makes it funnier.

> Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man

Not beyond the realms of possibility then

I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.

The rumor I saw when all this started implied it was.

I think it said that Mullenweg always came back from burning man with lots of ideas.

The implication to me was the ideas were terrible and the board was afraid of having to deal with it yet again. But that’s a total guess.

I have worked at Automattic for ~7 years. I don't see the history of bad ideas coming from Burning man.

Matt is always looking for inspiration, as we all should be. Whether it comes from Burning man or elsewhere seems irrelevant.

If you're currently at Automattic... any idea who your current CEO actually is? :) What's all this like internally?

Matt is Automattic's CEO.... I see what you're doing... ;)

We/I want to build useful things. This is a distraction. I believe Automattic is a net benefit for the web and look forward to having more focus to continue delivering on that. Internally, were focused on that.

Are there ideas coming from Burning Man?

:) Not sure.

I feel like the only way this makes sense is if "ideas" is a euphamism for drugs.

Sounds like you've never worked for a CEO with "ideas." One time a CEO made the whole R&D team switch to "aspect oriented programming" because he had read a blog post. Another time we had to switch to C# because he had heard it wad better than Java.

Trust me, you don't want a CEO with "ideas."

I worked for a company with co-CEOs. The ideas CEO left and the company tanked. I think there's a right way to have an ideas CEO but maybe a balance helps keep them from switching everybody to C# on a whim. A CEO without ideas seems like a recipe for at best stagnation and at worse just fleecing the company of value and taking a golden parachute.

It’s 100% about the quality of the ideas, isn’t it.

I agree no ideas is just a path towards irrelevance.

The CEO doesn't necessarily have to have the ideas. How many ideas do you think Tim Cook had regarding products at Apple?

Spending time at Burning Man can completely detach you from reality

We need to go back to a time when a CEO 'trolling' or acting like this would be career suicide. It seems like half of the biggest tech companies are run by people with the emotional and social intelligence of 3 years olds.

And countries.

The additional reporting at [0] about his alleged behaviour in internal channels along with his public posts on social media really reinforces this same feeling for me:

> “oh, since I’m a pirate now, I fucking curse. after 42 years of never uttering a curse word, it’s kinda fucking fun. if this is a HR problem @caron please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with @Mark Davies.” […] Mullenweg also posted that the Automattic Slack “smells funny, like turncoats” and said he was going to hang out in the WordPress.org Slack instead.

Good luck to everyone in the blast radius.

[0] https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-swears-for-th...

I’ve been around the WP crowd enough to know countless stories that prove mm is basically a manual case of narcissistic personality disorder. The reality shifting, the constant blaming, the unsubstantiated claims… they could put his picture on the DSM5 definition of the disorder. The problem with these personalities is that they are untreatable and tend to get way worse with power/money. He is an utter and catastrophic disgrace to the whole wordpress community and the only hope is that he gets to be successfully ousted.

They are not necessarily untreatable but to be treatable they need to realize and admit they have an issue, which is unlikely and gets even less likely if they are financially successful.

Seems pretty tame compared to the antics of the richest person on the planet, perhaps trolling is the new normal.

"A fish rots from the head" is true for unofficial structures just as much as it is for official structures.

Would be nice if Tesla, SpaceX, Cursor, former Twitter all rotted with their stock prices plunging to zero, but fElon fanpeople and the AI sheep still only posting on former Twitter will keep them afloat.

you don’t get it he is quirky

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