One Man Controls 43% of the Web. Court Documents Show What He Did With That Power.

Unsealed court docs: Automattic employees discussed plans to steal every WP site from hosts who refused to pay. 43% of the web. One man. Zero accountability.

Forty-three percent. One man.

Unsealed court documents from February 2026 reveal that Automattic employees discussed plans to “steal every single WP site” from hosting companies that refused to pay up.

If you have been following my series on open source betrayals (Mozilla, IBM/Red Hat), you already know the pattern. A company or individual builds trust through open source, then weaponizes that trust for profit. Matt Mullenweg just wrote the most aggressive chapter yet.

WordPress is a free, open source content management system that launched in 2003. It powers 43.5% of all websites on the internet, from personal blogs to corporate sites, government pages, and e-commerce stores. Its plugin repository, theme directory, and update servers are hosted on WordPress.org. Nearly half the web depends on that infrastructure. One person claims to personally own it.