Nobody owns WordPress, because “WordPress” is not one thing. The software is open source under the GPL and cannot be owned in the ordinary sense. The trademark belongs to a nonprofit, the WordPress Foundation. The wordpress.org website that distributes every plugin and theme update is controlled by Matt Mullenweg personally. And Automattic, the company most often described as WordPress’s owner, owns WordPress.com, which is a hosting business built on WordPress rather than WordPress itself.
The split matters because it explains how a leadership fight at a private company can dominate WordPress headlines without changing who controls the software your site runs. Most mainstream coverage gets it wrong. Here is the actual structure, with a source for each piece.
- No single person or company owns WordPress. Four different parties own four different things, and most reporting collapses them into one.
- The software is GPLv2, so nobody can own it in the usual sense. Anyone may copy, modify, redistribute or fork it.
- The WordPress trademark belongs to the nonprofit WordPress Foundation, which licenses commercial use exclusively to Automattic. A federal judge ruled in September 2026 that Automattic and Mullenweg are not owners of the marks.
- The wordpress.org domain, which distributes every plugin and theme update, is controlled by Matt Mullenweg personally. No official WordPress page discloses this.
- The company usually blamed or credited, Automattic, owns WordPress.com, a hosting business built on WordPress. It does not own WordPress, despite what the headlines say.
- In September 2026, Automattic’s board put Mullenweg on leave as CEO, and he was back about 33 hours later. Neither move touched the license, the trademark or wordpress.org.
The short answer: four owners, four different things
| What | Who controls it | Source |
|---|---|---|
| The WordPress software | Nobody, in the ownership sense. Licensed GPLv2 or later, so anyone can use, change, redistribute or fork it. | wordpress.org license page |
| The WordPress trademark and logo | The WordPress Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which licenses commercial use exclusively to Automattic. | Foundation trademark policy |
| wordpress.org (plugin and theme distribution, core updates) | Matt Mullenweg personally. | The Verge, TechCrunch |
| WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Tumblr | Automattic, a private for-profit company. | The Verge |
| The code itself, in practice | Thousands of volunteer and sponsored contributors, with Automattic the largest corporate contributor. | Five for the Future |
The software: nobody owns it, by design
WordPress the software is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. The license page on wordpress.org puts it plainly: “The license under which the WordPress software is released is the GPLv2 (or later) from the Free Software Foundation.”
In practical terms that means you already have every right that matters. You can download the code, read it, change it, run it commercially, and redistribute your changed version, provided you pass the same freedoms on. Nobody can revoke that, take the software private, or stop you using the copy you have. If the project’s stewardship ever became intolerable, the community could fork it, which is precisely how WordPress itself began: wordpress.org records that it “started in 2003 when Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg created a fork of b2/cafelog.”
This is the part that makes the ownership question unusual. For a normal product, asking who owns it tells you who decides its future. For WordPress, the license answers the ownership question and then hands the interesting part of it back: control is not in the copyright, it is in the trademark and the infrastructure.
The trademark: the WordPress Foundation owns it
The name is where ownership becomes real. The WordPress Foundation states that it “owns and oversees the trademarks for the names and logos of WordPress as well as a few other WordPress-related brands.” The marks it lists include the WordPress word mark, BuddyPress, Openverse and WP-CLI, with the WordCamp mark held by WordPress Community Support PBC, a Foundation subsidiary. The footer of every page on wordpress.org repeats it: “The WordPress trademark is the intellectual property of the WordPress Foundation.”
The Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose stated mission is “to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software,” and which says it is “responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks.”
Now the part that surprises people. Read the Foundation’s own trademark policy to the end and you find this instruction:
If you would like to use the WordPress trademark commercially, please contact Automattic, they have the exclusive license.
WordPress Foundation, trademark policy
So the nonprofit holds the mark, and a single private company holds the exclusive commercial rights to it. That arrangement dates from 2010, when Automattic transferred the marks to the Foundation, and it sits at the center of the WP Engine litigation described further down.
A federal court has said Automattic is not the owner
The WP Engine case has already tested this. In a September 24, 2026 order, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín found that Automattic and Mullenweg are “neither owners nor registrants of the marks at issue,” and that they lack “a truly exclusive license that grants all substantial trademark rights, including the ability to exclude the licensor from using the marks.” She dismissed their trademark counterclaims to the extent they brought them in their own right. The Foundation’s claims continue.
This was a pleading-stage ruling about who can sue, and it says nothing about whether WP Engine infringed anything. It does put in a federal court order what the Foundation’s own policy already says: the name belongs to the Foundation, not to Automattic.
The Foundation is much smaller than its role suggests
It is easy to picture the body that owns the WordPress trademark as a substantial institution. Its IRS filings say otherwise. The WordPress Foundation is registered in San Francisco, California, under EIN 20-5498932, and received its 501(c)(3) determination in June 2009. For its 2024 fiscal year, the latest return ProPublica shows, it reported total revenue of $55,153 and total assets of $826,820. The year before, revenue was $26,438.
For context, WordPress runs 39.5% of all websites and 58.2% of sites whose content management system can be identified, according to W3Techs on November 1, 2026. The nonprofit that owns the name on that share of the web took in about $55,000 in a year. The gap doesn’t mean anything is wrong, but it explains why the Foundation is not the practical center of power its title suggests.
wordpress.org: the piece nobody officially discloses
This is the most consequential and least documented answer on the page. The wordpress.org website is not just a marketing site. It is the distribution layer: the plugin and theme directories, the update servers your site checks against, and the release channel for core itself. Every WordPress install on the internet talks to it.
It is controlled by Matt Mullenweg personally, not by the Foundation and not by Automattic. He said so himself, in an October 2024 interview with The Verge: “WordPress.org just belongs to me personally.”
He has since said he regrets the phrasing. In a June 2025 Decoder interview, Nilay Patel read the quote back to him and the exchange went like this:
That has been taken out of context so many times. I regret ever saying that. It is the worst thing ever.
Because you were asking about specific ownership. Like, okay, what entity? … which is very different from how the site runs, how decisions are made, how the code works.
If you look at how WordPress.org is run, just how everything works, it is the result and the fruits of clearly tens of thousands of people and hundreds who work on it daily.
Matt Mullenweg, The Verge Decoder, June 2025
That is a fair correction and worth carrying: the site is run by a large community even if it is held by one person. But Patel’s follow-up is the point most site owners care about, and Mullenweg did not dispute the underlying fact:
I have seen others say there is a supply chain weakness if you have a WordPress dependency, where Matt Mullenweg owns WordPress.org, which is the plugin repository.
Nilay Patel, The Verge Decoder, June 2025
Two things we checked directly. First, no official WordPress property discloses who owns the domain. The wordpress.org domains page lists wordpress.org, wordpress.com, wordpress.net, wordpress.tv and wordpressfoundation.org as legitimate domains without saying who holds any of them, and the Foundation’s trademark policy does not mention the domain at all. Second, the public whois record does not answer it either: the registrar is MarkMonitor, and the registrant’s name and organization are redacted for privacy.
So the most important dependency in the WordPress ecosystem is held privately, and you can only learn that from interviews and court filings, not from any page WordPress publishes.
Automattic owns WordPress.com, not WordPress
Automattic is the private, for-profit company Mullenweg founded in 2005. It owns WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, Simplenote and others, holds what the Foundation calls an exclusive commercial license to the trademark, and is the largest corporate contributor of code to the open source project.
What it does not own is WordPress. The Verge, which has covered the dispute in detail, describes the split accurately:
There is the nonprofit WordPress Foundation that owns the WordPress trademark. There is WordPress.org, from which the open-source project is managed by Matt himself. Then there is Automattic, which is the for-profit company that offers its own site hosting and enterprise services on top of the core WordPress technology, and which contributes an enormous amount of code back to the open-source WordPress.
The Verge, Decoder
The WordPress.com and WordPress.org distinction trips up more people than any other part of this. WordPress.com is a hosted service you sign up for, run by Automattic, with the limits any hosted platform has. WordPress.org is the open source project you download and run yourself. If you have ever wondered which one you are on, or wanted to move between them, we have a full walk-through of migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org.
Why the press keeps getting this wrong
When Automattic’s board placed Mullenweg on leave in September 2026, 404 Media’s first version of the story called him “the founder of Automattic, the company that owns WordPress, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and a host of other popular internet brands and pieces of software.” That sentence is right about Tumblr and Pocket Casts and wrong about WordPress. 404 Media has since corrected it to WordPress.com, but versions of the same sentence appeared across the coverage.
The error is understandable. Automattic is the commercial face of WordPress, employs a large share of its contributors, holds the exclusive trademark license, and shares a founder with the project. Calling it the owner is a reasonable shorthand that happens to be false, and it matters because it implies that a change of control at Automattic would be a change of control of WordPress. It would not be.
What the September 2026 leadership fight changed
On September 9, 2026, Automattic’s board placed Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence and named CFO Mark Davies interim CEO, as TechCrunch and 404 Media both reported. Mullenweg wrote in company Slack that Davies had “conspired” with three board members to do it “behind my back,” adding, “I voted against that.”
It did not last. On September 12, Automattic confirmed that “Matt Mullenweg is the chairman and CEO of Automattic, with full support of the board,” and said he “was away for only 33 hours and 20 minutes.”
Map those three days onto the four-part structure above and the scope is clear:
- Changed, briefly: who ran Automattic, the private company. That was a real corporate event, and it reversed within days.
- Not changed: the GPL license on the software, which no board can alter.
- Not changed: the Foundation’s ownership of the trademark.
- Not changed: control of wordpress.org. Mullenweg holds it personally, not through Automattic, so a leave from Automattic had no bearing on it.
- Not changed: his leadership of the open source project. Mary Hubbard, WordPress.org’s executive director, posted the same evening that “WordPress leadership and direction remain unchanged. Matt continues to lead our project, and I remain Executive Director.”
If you run a WordPress site, that is the whole answer: nothing about your install changed during those 33 hours. Updates still come from the same place, the license is the same, and so is the plugin directory.
What is actually contested, and where
The ownership structure above is settled fact. Whether it was fairly disclosed is the subject of active litigation, and that distinction matters.
WP Engine sued Automattic and Mullenweg in the US District Court for the Northern District of California in October 2024 (WPEngine, Inc. v. Automattic Inc., case number 4:24-cv-06917). The dispute began when Mullenweg publicly attacked WP Engine over trademark use and contribution levels, then cut its access to wordpress.org, which broke plugin and theme updates for its customers. A federal judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction in December 2024 ordering that access restored.
Among its claims, WP Engine alleges that Automattic and Mullenweg presented WordPress as a community-governed project while privately retaining control of the trademarks and wordpress.org, and that the 2010 transfer to the Foundation came with an exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free license back to Automattic. Those are allegations a court has not ruled on, and Automattic disputes them.
The case is still moving. The September 24, 2026 order that trimmed Automattic’s and Mullenweg’s trademark counterclaims also let WP Engine’s four antitrust claims (monopolization, attempted monopolization and two tying claims) go forward. Summary judgment briefing runs into February 2027, and a 10-day jury trial is set for October 19, 2027. TechCrunch has a detailed timeline of how the dispute started.
What this means if you run a WordPress site
Three practical conclusions fall out of the structure, and none of them require you to have an opinion about the people involved.
- Your right to keep using WordPress is not contingent on any of this. The GPL is irrevocable for the copy you hold, so no corporate or personal outcome can take the software away from you.
- Your update pipeline is a single point of dependency, and it is privately held. That is the honest risk, and it is the one the courtroom fight has been about. In practice it has been disrupted once, for WP Engine customers in 2024, and a court reversed it. Keeping working backups is the sane response to a dependency you do not control.
- A change at Automattic is not a change to WordPress. When the next headline conflates them, the four rows in the table above are how you work out whether it affects you.
If you want to see how the project keeps shipping regardless, our history of every WordPress release tracks it version by version, and our scan of the top 20,000 websites measures how much of the web is actually running it and on which versions.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns WordPress?
No single entity does. The software is licensed under the GPLv2 or later, so it cannot be owned in the usual sense and anyone may fork it. The WordPress trademark is owned by the nonprofit WordPress Foundation, which licenses commercial use exclusively to Automattic. The wordpress.org website that distributes plugins, themes and core updates is controlled by Matt Mullenweg personally. Automattic owns WordPress.com, which is a hosting service built on WordPress.
Does Automattic own WordPress?
No, although a great deal of reporting says so. Automattic owns WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Tumblr and other products, holds the exclusive commercial license to the WordPress trademark, and is the largest corporate contributor to the project. It does not own the WordPress software, which is GPL licensed, or the trademark, which belongs to the WordPress Foundation. In September 2026 a federal judge also found that Automattic is neither an owner nor a registrant of the WordPress marks.
Who owns wordpress.org?
Matt Mullenweg controls it personally. He said in an October 2024 interview with The Verge that “WordPress.org just belongs to me personally,” a phrasing he later said he regretted, arguing the site is run by tens of thousands of contributors even though he holds it. No official WordPress page discloses the ownership, and the public whois record shows only the registrar’s privacy service.
What is the WordPress Foundation and what does it own?
It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, founded by Mullenweg and granted charitable status in June 2009, whose mission is to democratize publishing through open source GPL software. It owns the WordPress, BuddyPress, Openverse and WP-CLI trademarks, with WordCamp held by a subsidiary. It is small: its 2024 return reports total revenue of $55,153 and total assets of $826,820.
Can WordPress be sold or bought?
The software cannot, because the GPL means every existing copy stays free to use, modify and redistribute regardless of who owns anything. What could in principle change hands is Automattic as a company, the trademark if the Foundation transferred it, and the wordpress.org domain, since it is personal property. Those are the levers people are really discussing when they ask whether WordPress could be bought.
Does Matt Mullenweg own WordPress?
He co-created it with Mike Little in 2003, founded Automattic, founded the WordPress Foundation and leads the open source project, and he personally controls the wordpress.org domain. He does not own the software, which is GPL licensed, nor the trademark, which the Foundation holds. “Owns WordPress” is the wrong frame; “controls the distribution infrastructure and leads the project” is closer.
Who is the CEO of WordPress?
Nobody, because WordPress is an open source project rather than a company. Matt Mullenweg leads the project and is chairman and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. Mary Hubbard is executive director of WordPress.org.
What company is behind a site on wordpress.com, and who is its CEO?
An address like example.wordpress.com is a site hosted on WordPress.com, which is run by Automattic Inc., the private company Matt Mullenweg founded in 2005 and still leads as CEO. Automattic runs the platform, not the site: the site belongs to whoever created it, and WordPress.com’s terms of service state, “We don’t own your content.” So the company name and CEO for a .wordpress.com address are Automattic and Mullenweg only in the sense of the hosting provider.
Did the September 2026 leadership change affect who owns WordPress?
No. Automattic’s board placed Mullenweg on paid leave on September 9, 2026 and made CFO Mark Davies interim CEO, and by September 12 Automattic confirmed Mullenweg was back as chairman and CEO. Either way, that was a change at one private company. The GPL license, the Foundation’s trademark ownership, control of wordpress.org and Mullenweg’s leadership of the open source project were all unaffected, and WordPress.org’s executive director said the project’s leadership and direction remained unchanged.
Is WordPress still free?
Yes, and that is a license guarantee rather than a policy someone could reverse. The GPLv2 gives you the right to run, study, modify and redistribute the software, and nothing in the corporate or legal disputes around it changes the terms attached to the copy you download. You still pay for hosting and a domain, which is what our guide to starting a WordPress blog walks through.
Bottom line
WordPress is owned in pieces: the code by everyone, the name by a small nonprofit, the commercial rights to that name by one company, and the infrastructure everything depends on by one person. Most confusion about WordPress governance comes from treating those four as a single owner, and most headlines do.
The practical version is short. Nobody can take WordPress away from you, because of the license. The piece worth watching is wordpress.org, more than whoever runs Automattic, because it is the one part with no public paperwork and no obvious succession plan. September showed the difference: Automattic’s CEO changed twice in four days, and wordpress.org did not change at all.
