Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster

116 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by ilamont
(techcrunch.com)

155 Comments

glenstein

6 hours ago

Seems like nobody is actually reading the TFA which is a shame because what the article describes is truly mind boggling:

>However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic

What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.

htrp

3 hours ago

It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him).

palmotea

2 hours ago

> It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him).

So what happens when the courts get involved?

Because "he won, because he was the only one with the passwords," seems like a software engineer fantasy.

tinco

an hour ago

It's a true power struggle. As a software engineer I have actually fallen into the trap of thinking that because of the law or a contract something would happen. It is a softer power than I expected.

The board wants to make money, that's why they hold shares and positions. If Mullenweg has the power to destroy value, that will be powerful leverage over them. If his employees side with him, if he holds the accounts, they'll have to negotiate carefully.

Of course, you would need a lawyer to determine when this crosses from a civil dispute to a criminal dispute because at some point him using the keys when he's not authorized could be a crime and if they can get the cops involved that certainly changes the dynamic.

mitxela

10 minutes ago

It's already criminal from the sound of it

mitxela

11 minutes ago

If he really did this, he's going to prison, but not for a few years. Defrauding shareholders is one of the worst things you can do, because it attacks the system directly.

riffraff

an hour ago

Reminds me of that story of the CEO of ARM China was fired but refused to return the chop which meant he was still in power.

x0x0

4 hours ago

Holy shit. You are, if anything, underselling the article.

> 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.” Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.”

And like all well-run companies, it's not clear who the ceo is.

hurfdurf

11 minutes ago

  I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.
Very elaborate prank in preparation of the Talk-like-a-Pirate-Day on Sept 19th?

tyre

2 hours ago

This sounds like a mental breakdown.

schnebbau

37 minutes ago

No, it just sounds like a troll.

prox

14 minutes ago

Could very well be a venn diagram here

stackghost

6 hours ago

That company sounds like a clusterfuck. Good luck attracting good talent with such dysfunctional leadership.

neya

5 hours ago

A lot of WordPress enterprise users will be upset after finding out that after paying $20-100k a month, Wordpress actually poaches their employees. Just inspect a Wordpress enterprise site's response to certain endpoints using cURL or Postman, it will actually tell you to apply for Automattic. I have been meaning to write about this for a very long time.

fergie

33 minutes ago

Its called "free movement of labor" and its a very good thing. Arguably the reason that Silicon Valley happened in the first place.

newtonianrules

an hour ago

People pay $100k/mo for fucking Wordpress in 2026?

stavros

17 minutes ago

It's not poaching to post an ad that someone who works elsewhere happens to see.

meric_

5 hours ago

Eh I mean this is common default no? If you inspect element on many sites it links to the career page. Reddit, discord, etc.

Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching

subarctic

5 hours ago

Too bad because they have some incredible products

stackghost

5 hours ago

All I know is Wordpress and Beeper, are any of their other products good? Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?

dofm

4 hours ago

Woocommerce is everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Over four million stores.

About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.

Because it’s a plugin for WP you might not ever notice a store is Woocommerce until you get the store emails that people often don’t customise much and have an identifiable look to them.

It’s fully possible to run a simple Woocommerce store without giving anyone a cut beyond your payment provider’s normal fees.

It’s not too difficult to extend; custom payment gateways and order processing hooks, inbound APIs, GraphQL etc.

If you are judicious about your install — just run Woocommerce, WP, customise one of the core themes or a well-known good theme like WP-Start or an Anders Noren theme, use the Stripe or Paypal payment gateway —- it’s pretty solidly secure, too; you’ll get automatic updates.

It’s definitely not the most fun thing to configure and administer, but it’s not Magento at least. I have never enjoyed that.

Automattic’s acquisition of Woocommerce was absolutely a blessing at the time. Some of the more complex extensions to Woocommerce are paid addons, which is where they make their money (as well as payment gateway referral fees, which was a little-noticed part of the squabble with WP Engine, who modified Woocommerce to change the referrer to point to them). Woothemes (the previous owner) were unpredictable and a little rapacious; they changed their pricing in ways that caused concern (and Woocommerce itself started as an acrimonious and hostile fork of a plugin called Jigoshop).

I would really like to stop using WP over time, and it feels more urgent each time an Automattic story hits the headlines.

But I don’t think there are many better small e-commerce offerings than Woocommerce that offer that level of open-source control or cost control for people who need to run a modestly large store on a true shoestring.

dmurray

22 minutes ago

> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.

Source? This source [0] puts Shopify 10x ahead of WooCommerce on GMV. They're close on number of installations. That roughly matches my experience working in this space in 2022, though it's definitely possible our customers weren't representative of the market as a whole.

[0] https://www.sanjaydey.com/shopify-vs-woocommerce-why-brands-...

mastazi

10 minutes ago

The link that you provided largely confirms what parent said: it puts WooCommerce ahead of Shopify in terms of store count, with a number (4.34M live stores) which is consistent to the one mentioned by parent ("over four million stores").

> They're close on number of installations.

2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?

It's true that the link puts Shopify at roughly 10X in terms of GMV but parent did not claim otherwise.

sphars

4 hours ago

I'm a fan of PocketCasts as my podcast app on Android. It was bought by Automattic in 2021.

ab5tract

an hour ago

TIL! Am I crazy or was it at one point partly owned by NPR?

aryonoco

an hour ago

You're not crazy.

Pocket Casts was originally developed by a South Australian startup, Shifty Jelly. Sold to a consortium of public broadcasters which included NPR. Then there was a change of heart the the public broadcasters decided that they actually don't want to be in the game, so was divested in a firesale.

Automattic has picked up a few of these assets for peanuts, Tumblr and Pocket Casts are amongst them. All are assets which were once much more high flying, but still have a core of dedicated users/fans.

jimmydddd

4 hours ago

Not an enterprise product, but SimpleNote is great. I was happy that they bought it.

dofm

3 hours ago

Matt famously used it himself and bought them the domain name (which was expensive) and gave it to them no-strings-attached.

A more optimistic, less chaotic and exasperating time.

aryonoco

2 hours ago

All I care about is my favourite podcast app, Pocket Casts, which Automattic bought in a dumpster fire a few years ago.

But even if I don't personally use WP, the fact that something like 25% of the web runs on software which this lunatic has this much control over, is problematic in itself.

darylteo

3 hours ago

Eh, it's not a seller's market anymore.

BLKNSLVR

6 hours ago

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.

nosioptar

6 hours ago

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?

BLKNSLVR

5 hours ago

> Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man

Not beyond the realms of possibility then

TJSomething

5 hours ago

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.

MBCook

5 hours ago

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.

manytimesfail

2 hours ago

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.

Seattle3503

42 minutes ago

Are there ideas coming from Burning Man?

uncle_kostya

2 hours ago

Spending time at Burning Man can completely detach you from reality

bawolff

3 hours ago

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

csnover

5 hours ago

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...

moomoo11

5 hours ago

you don’t get it he is quirky

dang

7 hours ago

Recent and related:

Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 - Sept 2026 (144 comments)

Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283 - Sept 2026 (372 comments)

(I know there have been many other threads in this long saga but I don't have the time (or the stomach) to try to list them)

p.s. We merged an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683265) into this one, which is why the timestamps of some of the comments are older.

bawolff

4 hours ago

I don't say this lightly, but this sounds like someone going through a mental health crisis.

f33d5173

7 hours ago

So he was on a leave of absense, and now is no longer on such a leave? This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense, but they give no evidence of that in the article. I saw it suggested that he usually has wild ideas after returning from burning man, and the board wanted to insulate the company from the effects of that. That he's now back is evidence for a theory along those lines, and contradicts a theory that the board was trying to get rid of him. But I have no insight beyond that.

wmf

4 hours ago

Do you think his leave of absence was for one day?

DANmode

3 hours ago

> This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense

Way more are than we are told about.

fn-mote

6 hours ago

This title would benefit from editorializing “of Automattic” for those who do not follow the daily drama this individual has created.

ETA: Or better yet a clearer statement that nothing about this is clear.

Aeolun

2 hours ago

Matt is of the opinion that if they’re going to try and take his thing he might as well burn it down, isn’t he xD

largbae

18 hours ago

I only see the headlines of this drama. All it tells me is to stay far away from any dependency on this company.

xp84

6 hours ago

In 2010 WordPress seemed like important technology. It wasn’t perfect, was a big and fruitful hacking target, but it had been built and refined and had a big ecosystem.

I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP.

Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?

dylan604

5 hours ago

Why would you have vulns if you vibe coded it in a weekend? Just tell it to not have any security vulnerabilities. Boom!

8note

4 hours ago

you are less likely to have the same vulnerabilities as everyone else though, so unless somebody is targeting you, those vulnerabilities might not matter all that much

LtWorf

3 hours ago

Because LLMs output is always so unique and original. That's why it looks all the same right?

archagon

4 hours ago

Wot? You are incredibly likely to have the same vulnerabilities as everyone else (as they exist in your LLM’s training corpus).

tjpnz

4 hours ago

So security through obscurity.

t2r3121

5 hours ago

I mean... you can literally do that now. You can set up a loop to iteratively pentest, review and patch a codebase (with human supervision as you prefer) and it'll find and fix more vulnerabilities in a day than a pentest team used to find in a quarter, for a tiny fraction of the price.

This isn't a joke, this is now part of my pre-launch SOP. I even have it tracking everything so I can log stuff to fix vs. known shippables vs intentional design/false positives vs. upstream stuff which doesn't have a fix available yet, and keep track of which builds have the fixes. Almost entirely automated, I mostly review the findings and do some categorization/enrichment during the pentest review stage, and do a human code review pass as patches are submitted.

Stuff that used to take me multiple hours to write a fix for and then weeks to get code reviewed and deployed now get done in minutes.

lukevp

5 hours ago

How do you actually do that? Is it all running locally? Cloud agents? Would love to hear about this. I see these deep agent loops mostly just burning tokens, but when I guide the AI I get very good results, so I’m not sure where the disconnect lies.

t2r3121

4 hours ago

I use Zed (https://zed.dev) as my agent harness and either the $20 ChatGPT sub + Sol for personal/independent projects or an enterprise Claude account for sponsored/paid work. From the stats for my current work I use about $400/mo in tokens and a lot of that is non-coding work like pruning JIRA, managing business documentation, making dashboards - so my true coding agent cost is significantly less.

It's pretty simple, you could probably set up something like that by:

Configure some kind of CLI tool to talk to your ticketing system and git repo so you can programmatically interact with them. If you don't have a ticketing system, instruct the agent to use local text or markdown files to track issues and progress.

Ideally, make your code runnable in a way the agent can use. For my webapps I build a test harness so that I can run all the endpoints and workflows via reproducible tests against an embedded database. This is easier than it sounds, e.g. there are libraries out there to embed PostgreSQL or SQLite into source code, you can set up a test harness so you can run unit tests, integration tests and workflow tests that use your real frontend, server and database.

Paste this comment thread into the agent prompt and tell it to run a similar loop on your code base: a session that searches for vulns and writes up a report, some way for a human to do a review pass on the report, a session that indexes the reviewed findings into tickets, and sessions that fix the fixable issues and submit patches to your repo. The next search session should first read all the open issues so it doesn't duplicate work of earlier sessions.

LESS IS MORE - avoid fancy agent tooling and skills, don't cargo cult from others, build your own tools as you find your own needs. If something can be automated, use the agent to write tools and tests for it, don't just keep prodding the agent to do it.

what

3 hours ago

Can you share with the class the web apps you’ve built this way?

t2r3121

5 hours ago

I used to ask this question back ~2015 - I was seeing companies with massive, clunky CMS installs just so their non-technical/less-technical staff could update their websites without filing tickets to IT/dev. It seemed to be more about those departments wanting autonomy and not having to wait weeks or months for internal IT/dev to make site updates. The consensus within one dev group was that the company would have been better served by hiring someone who knew HTML/CSS/Javascript to embed with the non-technical people and edit a straightforward frontend site for them.

ecshafer

4 hours ago

In most web frameworks its not terribly hard to extern content (you probably do this already for translations) and just have a nice little yaml or json thats easily edited.

esseph

3 hours ago

This also describes sharepoint

graemep

5 hours ago

A lot of people know it, there are a huge number of existing installs that work well, the ecosystem is huge and not everyone wants to vibe code replacements.

It is very empowering for people with limited skills.

dlcarrier

9 hours ago

Definitely stay away from anything Matt Mullenweg is involved in. Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.

NSUserDefaults

18 hours ago

So glad I just converted my site to Hugo.. happy to get away from this whole bunch of people.

zero_shift

18 hours ago

I only recently realised why the org is called AutoMATTic

scarecrowbob

16 hours ago

It took me quite a while to "get" the "Arby's" restaurant name.

Sniffnoy

6 hours ago

So on reading this comment I was like, "oh, I see, Arby's, like RB, roast beef?" Except on looking it up, that's not the explanation! "Arby's" does come from the initials "RB"... but it doesn't stand for "roast beef", it stands for "Raffel brothers"! Rather less obvious.

stackghost

6 hours ago

Tangential, but I have no idea who is eating at Arby’s. The food looks positively vile from the advertisements.

xp84

6 hours ago

It used to be pretty good. Same as most fast food.

anymouse123456

5 hours ago

No. It wasn’t ever good. Tried it in the early eighties. It was barely dog food back then too.

giantrobot

4 hours ago

Do you not like your dogs or something? I wouldn't give Arby's to someone I hated.

nosioptar

5 hours ago

The food is pretty vile. Friends that worked their described the "beef" as being a weird loaf of pressurized mewt-like protein before its sliced.

I used to eat there occasionally because it was cheapish many, many years ago.

rpozarickij

18 hours ago

A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).

Haven880

6 hours ago

Not really explaining autoMATTic. Amazon, "A" is because Jeff wanted it at the top of search. Fox, Dell, Walmart, Disney, all is closer to the example.

MBCook

4 hours ago

I was just thinking about the A thing the other day.

A1 Plumbing, Acme Brick, AAA Home Servicing all the companies named over the years to try and be the first in the phone book.

But phone books have been dead for a long time. And search results aren’t alphabetical. It would be interesting for someone to graph or somehow otherwise show how names have changed in response.

I have seen those occasional pictures of businesses named “(thing) near me” in an attempt to win at Google searches.

mitxela

6 minutes ago

There are a few called My Location or Current Location too. They come up when you want Google Maps to navigate starting from where you are...

jrflowers

6 hours ago

Same with Taco Bell

dylan604

5 hours ago

If only Alexander hadn't wasted time on the phone!

Hamuko

17 hours ago

Did you know that Adidas was founded by Adolf "Adi" Dassler?

robshep

17 hours ago

And Puma by his brother Rudi, in the same town. Great Feud story.

tzs

6 hours ago

Another brother/brother business rivalry, although not involving founders, was Sears and Montgomery Ward from 1985-1990. In 1985 Bernard Brennan become CEO of Montgomery Ward and in that same year his older brother Edward Brennan become CEO of Sears.

Chicago-based Sears was the largest US retailer at the time, and Chicago-based Montgomery Ward was the 5th largest.

dofm

16 hours ago

Rudidas would definitely be a worse name. Though I'd be surprised if an Amazon Marketplace knockoff brand is not already using it.

mercer

13 hours ago

Adolfler would've been even worse.

dylan604

5 hours ago

Not in today's climate.

Hamuko

14 hours ago

It was briefly "Ruda" before it morphed into "Puma".

dofm

14 hours ago

I did not know that. Very good decision!

pluc

15 hours ago

all day i diss another sibling

xp84

6 hours ago

Imagine how glad they were at some point that they didn’t go with “Adolf’s Sneakers”!

cebert

19 hours ago

This sounds like a mistake and a part of Automatic. This is not a good look for the brand.

KPGv2

2 hours ago

Anytime I read anything about this guy, Automattic, or Wordpress, I—a Tumblr user—get the nervous sweats about my beloved shayla.

greatgib

5 hours ago

What is curious is that there is very little "leak" from insiders regarding what is going on, how employees are living this joke level management.

MBCook

5 hours ago

I can’t help but think that’s because they don’t know any better and maybe because they’re getting better informed by the reporting than what they’re actually getting from management.

Which would be terrible if true.

davidmurphy

10 hours ago

Despicable. What an obscene leader + board to not have the guts to remove him properly.

dlcarrier

9 hours ago

He can vote in a replacement board. The board knew that any action they took was temporary, and likely planned around this from the start.

ImPostingOnHN

an hour ago

maybe they have a good severance package and are tired of being impotent to curb matt's nonsense

yieldcrv

5 hours ago

Dont these no-code chasing marketing teams have other ways of building their leadgen ponzi schemes instead of bothering with Wordpress by now?

applfanboysbgon

6 hours ago

> and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well,” a company spokesperson shared

Did anyone else think "what the fuck did I just read" after this sentence? Did Matt write it himself while posing as a "spokesperson"? This reads like that time Trump wrote in pseudonymously to a newspaper about how amazing and perfect Trump was.

Oh, I hadn't finished reading. The whole article is a WTF did I just read.

generj

18 hours ago

What a feckless board.

throwaway463645

4 hours ago

I'm not involved at all in WP, but one thing that I've noticed is that when people talk about Matt Mullenweg online, it's apparently alright to call him mentally ill, scum, unhinged, wish him harm, cheer his setbacks, etc etc.

I've actually never seen anything like it. Is this what the WP community are like? I think that would break me too.

Microsoft has done plenty of awful things in its day, but I've never seen people diagnose Steve Ballmer with mental disorders and wish him harm, let alone that would become just the accepted majoritarian narrative around him, as it seems to be around Matt Mullenweg. It seems wild.

More broadly, why is there a 'WP drama' sub-Reddit? Why are there blogs documenting all of this with glee? Why are people registering domains to post screeds about this? In other words, why has a cottage industry sprung up around - as far as I can tell - bullying Matt Mullenweg?

I don't know what to make of it. Who are the WP community, that this is how they engage? Is there some big 4chan-WordPress overlap I'm not aware of? Is this an outgrowth of teenage faux-radicalism off Tumblr? I genuinely don't know, but it seems very off-putting. If this is what the WP community are like, I sure wouldn't want to become involved in it.

delichon

18 hours ago

Corporate coup survivors: Matt Mullenweg, Sam Altman, Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark. They should form a club.

larodi

18 hours ago

an esoteric club perhaps, given half of these folks are imaginary?

righthand

7 hours ago

Modern socializing is all about appreciating non-existent achievements by non-existent people so that everyone knows you’re cool. Or as best stated: “Life will find a way.” - Dr. Real Human Jurassic Park Character, And Not Michael Crichton

Grombobulous

19 hours ago

That’s a weird thing to say about “coup attempts.”

Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.

In the world of AI I imagine that Automattic’s core business model is in turmoil.

freedomben

18 hours ago

> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.

Ianal but I don't think the laws care about governing structure of corps. You can start a new corp and run it democratically all you want. There are co-ops and other interesting structures out there

marcus_holmes

6 hours ago

Afaik corps can only have board voting on the basis of share ownership ("one share one vote"), but you can mess around with how many votes each share class gets.

Co-ops can have more democratic voting arrangements, and usually have "one shareholder one vote" principles, though other options are available, and you can mess around with how many votes each shareholder gets.

bawolff

3 hours ago

We picked democracy because it is very difficult for a citizen to move to a different country/start their own if they are unhappy. Democracy is a fix for that power imbalance.

By contrast its relatively easy to quit and start a new company if you feel like it. That is the control for a company.

Arnt

18 hours ago

Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.

kmeisthax

18 hours ago

It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy. It's very explicitly plutocracy (rule by money) as the operating principle of voting power is one share, one vote.

Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy.

If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.

Arnt

17 hours ago

It's one share, one vote. And you have a choice: You can ask the company to pay you (ie. apply for a job there), or you can pay for a share in the company. Either way, the decisions are made by those who pay. And that can include you — anyone and everyone has the right to start a company and to employ others, anyone and everyone has the right to ask for shares in the company as part of negotiating compensation.

I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.

Timon3

14 hours ago

> It's one share, one vote.

This is just wrong. As kmeisthax mentioned, shares can have different voting weights - if any at all. Many shareholders have no voting power.

> I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.

Did you actually employ them, or did you buy a specific service?

Arnt

13 hours ago

Indeed, shares can have different voting weights. And that matters, if you care mostly about the corner cases.

Timon3

9 hours ago

Well, it matters a whole lot once you choose to bring up "One share, one vote" in response to "One person, one vote", since it shows that it's either wrong or shows a gross misunderstanding of democracy.

Arnt

an hour ago

IMO it matters roughly as much as it's common. Do you know any country where, say, 10% of public companies have non-voting stock your can buy and voting stock your cannot easily buy? 20%? 50%?

fc417fc802

5 hours ago

A hypothetical country with multiple classes of citizens that had different rights and voting powers would not inherently be undemocratic. It's not something I'm in favor of but equality != democracy.

Timon3

5 hours ago

But said country would not fulfill "One person, one vote". Why should we weaken such fundamental ideas by allowing them to mean the opposite of their real meaning?

The same phenomenon is happening with "Opt-In by Default". This is newspeak.

fc417fc802

4 hours ago

You are asserting this "one person one vote" definition of democracy. I am questioning it. Where did this constraint on what qualifies as "real" democracy come from?

Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.

Timon3

3 hours ago

> You are asserting this "one person one vote" definition of democracy. I am questioning it. Where did this constraint on what qualifies as "real" democracy come from?

From kmeisthax? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683985

I'm not asserting this definition. I'm arguing against the attempt at newspeak. If one share doesn't imply one vote (because there are different classes etc.), what is wrong with pointing out the obvious contradiction in "One share, one vote"?

> Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.

I disagree that the US was a democracy while voting was restricted, but that's not really relevant. I'm not claiming that my view is right, or that anyone should be convinced - take that up with kmeisthax if you wish.

fc417fc802

29 minutes ago

Yes, kmeisthax was the first to state it in this thread. On that basis you referred to a "gross misunderstanding of democracy" and later used the term "newspeak" leading me to believe that you hold that definition to be correct. You (and kmeisthax, and possibly others) are asserting it to the extent that a rationale for that definition has not been provided.

You cannot argue that a particular usage of a word is wrong while claiming that you aren't taking a position on the definition. And if you do take a position on the definition then you must be able to justify it.

Your view on the US and voting restrictions is directly relevant. It is what I am challenging. The common definition of democracy does not (to the best of my knowledge) include anything about equality. Those are entirely separate matters. The early US is widely recognized as a democratic republic (thus a democracy), albeit one with a great deal of institutional inequality.

worik

6 hours ago

> It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy

Voting is a democratic instrument, but a blunt one and not the most important.

"...those who spend five minutes voting every three years and call it democracy..."

Majoritarianism is undemocratic in that any desire less than 50% + 1 is deprecated.

If you care IMO the most important feature of a democracy is rule of law and access to the courts.

jasonvorhe

18 hours ago

Who do you think pays for the political election campaign theater of all theses "democratic candidates" though?

I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.

sva_

18 hours ago

> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.

Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy? I think we've seen over an over again which one works and which one doesn't.

miyoji

18 hours ago

> Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy?

Not at all. Market vs planned economy is about how the economy is set up. Are there businesses that offer products that you can choose between? That's a market economy. You can have that with democratic governance of corporations. The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy.

You don't need ownership by idiot dictators with money to have a market.

vasco

6 hours ago

> The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy

How? Will you also advocate to killing a bunch of people to get from now to the state where workers own the means of production like Trotsky and friends?

shigawire

18 hours ago

Democracy in business would be worker co-ops or employee ownership schemes. It would still be fully market-based, not planned.

jmull

18 hours ago

Is that a settled question? China isn't exactly struggling right now.

edgyquant

18 hours ago

China has succeeded so much by moving away from a planned economy when they were fully planned they were one of the poorest nations in the world. Most successful nations are mixed economies and yes, this is a settled question.

miyoji

18 hours ago

Past performance is no indication of future success. It doesn't matter what's been successful in the past, these things can change. Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed and so did the narrative.

None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.

wavemode

6 hours ago

> Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed

The word you're looking for is "collapse". It's when something is stable at one point in time, but then later breaks down. That's what "changed". It wasn't random like weather or something. The economic systems collapsed.

> None of this is settled

The fact that it has happened numerous times in different parts of the world makes it pretty settled in my mind.

Kuxe

18 hours ago

> Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was) According to whom?

nixon_why69

5 minutes ago

Soviet Russia and early communist China both went from mostly-illiterate peasant economies to mostly-literate, partially industrialized, with home-grown heavy industry and weapons technology in the span of like 15-20 years.

Then the soviet system stagnated hard under Brezhnev while the Chinese pivoted under Deng. But those first gains definitely happened under full communism and no capitalist economy has modernized faster.

fwip

18 hours ago

They were very poor before central planning, and the central planning is what got them from being very poor to relatively poor and economically powerful.

edgyquant

11 hours ago

This is objectively not the case, selling goods to America and Europe is what made China rich and that is due to a free market system they implemented

marcus_holmes

6 hours ago

Only very partially free, though. The govt still has massive control over the markets, and especially the banks. They still plan a lot of their economy.

sva_

18 hours ago

If you look on Alibaba or AliExpress and see different companies competing and undercutting each others prices, I don't really see it as a planned economy.

throwup238

18 hours ago

The CCP publishes their primary central planning mechanism for all to see. They just adopted the new 15th Five Year Plan in March [1].

There’s a whole bureaucracy just to coordinate the implementation at the sector, provincial, and corporate level driven by the State Council, NDRC, and NPC. Governments at all levels are involved with coming up with their own implementation plans to execute on the Five Year Plan.

You can trace decades of Chinese industrial development to those plans but the Chinese system is very different from the Soviet central planning mechanism, which is why I think you’re misinterpreting Alibaba’s price competition. The CCP explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like Alibaba and the manufacturers on it to compete; that’s their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the five year plan instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but it’s very much there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Five-Year_Plan

dghlsakjg

18 hours ago

I think a better term might be a “steered economy”. You see fierce competition in some very specific and preordained market areas. Lithium batteries, solar panels, electric cars, industrial and autonomous robots, AI.

Now go look at the 5 year plan from Beijing. Green technology, robotics, mature node chips, and AI are the focuses.

In other words, it isn’t a mistake that China dominates in the industries that it does.

thaumasiotes

18 hours ago

> China isn't exactly struggling right now.

Have you asked people in China about this?

flossly

18 hours ago

It's allowed to do a more democratic business in most countries, it's called a:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

There have been some govts that mandated this type of organization for part of their economy; we usually refer to that as communism.

(no value judgement here, there are day's when I'm quite a commie myself)

tirpen

18 hours ago

> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.

Congratulations you have reinvented communism from first principles! And you are completely correct in your analysis.

noir_lord

18 hours ago

Regulation of corporations and the internal/external harms they do isn't communism.

That's a hilarious leap.

flossly

18 hours ago

Actually you reply to a comment that makes a lot of sense.

Look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

And in Russian I believe such a company is called a "Soviet". They idea that the main part of the economy is run by this kind of organizations is one of the best parts of the USSR's attempt at communism.

noir_lord

18 hours ago

Except A) he said none of that B) it's not actually relevant to what he did say.

There is a vast range of ways you can regulate a corporation and only some of them qualify as communism.

Germany has worker councils, it's still not communist.

Several European countries have much stricter regulations on how companies behave that moves them from the absolute power fiefdom internal model, guess what, still not communism.