Capitalizing on a rare lapse in chaotic leadership, Automattic CFO Mark Davies and legal chief Andy Missan reportedly utilized a brief window of CEO Matt Mullenweg’s absence to frantically authorize one another's lucrative exit agreements.
The rapid reciprocal signing, which guaranteed both men a full year of salary and accelerated equity vesting in the event of their departure, was reportedly executed with a speed and efficiency usually reserved for critical zero-day infrastructure patches. Internal server logs indicate the two top lieutenants waited exactly four minutes after Mullenweg temporarily stepped away from his duties before initiating the mutual severance protocol, establishing a new company record for administrative velocity.
According to internal roadmaps, the severance deployment had been stalled in the legal department’s backlog for months, blocked by the daily requirement to draft new cease-and-desist letters to WordPress hosting providers. The brief intermission in executive combat operations finally provided the organizational bandwidth necessary to process the lifeboats.
The moment Matt’s Slack indicator went gray, we realized we had a very narrow window to push our exit packages to production before he returned to launch another trademark crusade.
To ensure the newly minted safety nets survived Mullenweg’s inevitable return, the authorizations were reportedly obfuscated within a routine, 400-page update to the WordPress open-source community guidelines. The legal team is said to have further secured the agreements by quietly hosting the PDFs on WP Engine servers, confident their CEO would refuse to ever access them.
Both executives have since resumed their regular daily duties, which currently consist of nodding slowly during leadership video calls while silently monitoring their vested equity metrics on a secondary display.