In October 2004, he was hired by CNET who would allow him to develop WordPress part-time as part of his job. He dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco for the position.[9]
Automattic
Mullenweg at WordCamp Bulgaria 2011
Mullenweg left CNET in October 2005 to focus on WordPress full-time.[10] Soon after he announced Akismet, an initiative to reduce comment and trackback spam.[11] In December, he founded Automattic, with Akismet and managed web hosting service WordPress.com as its flagship products. In January 2006, Mullenweg recruited former Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider to join Automattic as CEO.[citation needed]
Mullenweg at WordCamp Europe 2013
In January 2014, Mullenweg became CEO of Automattic. Schneider moved to work on new projects at Automattic.[1] From 2017 to 2019, Mullenweg also served as a board member for GitLab, Inc.[12]
Mullenweg began a three-month sabbatical from his role as CEO at the beginning of February 2024.[14] Later that month, Mullenweg engaged in a public feud with a transgenderTumblr user who, frustrated with the site's failure to address transphobicharassment, posted that she wished Mullenweg would die in a comedic way. The user was subsequently banned. Responding to user uproar, Mullenweg addressed the ban in posts on his personal Tumblr blog, in which he characterized the post as a death threat, and shared private account information about the user. Mullenweg also responded to individual commenters on Tumblr in posts and direct messages, and went to Twitter to respond to the banned user's tweets about the situation.[15][16] A few days later, transgender employees of Tumblr and Automattic made a post on the official Tumblr staff blog characterizing his response as "unwarranted and harmful" and stating that he did not speak on their behalf. They also said that the user's post was not a realistic threat of violence and not the reason for her ban.[17]