The current situation with WordPress has made the control of the website for WordPress, WordPress.org, an important security issue. Recently Matt Mullenweg has claimed in multiple places that he personally owns the website. Notably, though, he hasn’t done that on the WordPress website itself. Last week his lawyer also made that claim in a legal filing. If that is true, then a remaining question is who is paying for the website. As we have mentioned in previous posts, parts of the website are clearly hosted by Automattic. An Auotomattic employee stated in December that Automattic “provides the infrastructure and maintenance” for another part of the website. It also widely assumed that web hosts are paying to be included listed as recommended hosts on the WordPress website. Matt Mullenweg hasn’t provided any explanation as to what is going on with any of that. But it turns out he recently indirectly admitted to making money off of the website.
In looking over a recent legal filing from WP Engine’s lawyers, an October 1 tweet from Matt Mullenweg caught our eye for a different reason than the filing’s focus on it. The tweet says “So if http://W.org was under the Foundation, which is a 501c3, we’d have to remove all commercial plugins, like Elementor, Yoast, Jetpack, etc. That’s why I run it through me personally and pay taxes.” He wouldn’t have to pay taxes for simply owning the domain name or the website. He would have to pay taxes if he was receiving income from the website. (WordPress.org doesn’t have any employees, so he wouldn’t be paying employment taxes either.) [Read more]