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.)

That doesn’t mean he is making a profit off the website, since he might not be able to deduct all website’s expenses either at the same time as he received the income or he might not be able to deduct some of them at all.

We should note in a September 30 tweet he stated that he was subsidizing the website, “need to be independently wealthy to subsidize http://W.org, which serves 30k requests a second at peak.”

Matt Mullenweg could clear all this up by disclosing the finances and agreements for WordPress.org or move the website under the WordPress Foundation, where it could be independently managed. The original tweet we quoted was from him replying to something that explained how WordPress.org could exist in a non-profit instead under Matt Mullenweg’s ownership, contrary to his misleading claim that it can’t.