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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

This seems pretty easily explainable by Matt’s actions appearing to be hypocritical and antithetical to the views of people likely to comment on Internet message boards. People value stability from infrastructure providers and Matt’s antics with wordpress.org during the WPEngine dispute salted the earth for his chances of getting support in a board dispute. Even Matt’s own previous posting here did him no favours.

Sometimes a broadly one sided reaction is just a broadly one sided reaction, no conspiracy needed.

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> People value stability from infrastructure providers

Yeah that mechanism I understand, and I do understand that this would lead to exactly this kind of politics.

But.. that still means that it leads to this kind of politics, which was my point.

I'm not interested in the politics. I'd like to know the reality.

The reality is that the board has the votes to remove Matt as CEO and Matt has enough shares that if the board is decided by simple 1 vote per share then he can replace them but without knowing the agreements with its investors and shareholders we don’t know if the boards mechanisms actually allow him to replace all the members. Since the company is privately traded, these aren’t published anywhere, so it’s unknowable for those of us in the peanut gallery (unless it eventually goes to court, which is likely unless those agreements are decisive).

You would have to imagine that a big shareholder being able to neutralize ordinary functions of the board is outside, at a minimum, the spirit of that intended process. Though I'm sure that can be argued sixteen different directions.

Matt can flex his 84% voting power, but proxies can be clawed back, at which point he'll be left with 30% voting power (that being the fraction he owns outright). At worst, that is, since it would take a united front of shareholders and years of messy litigation. I think most investors would rather just cut their losses and sell their position.

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