When Private Equity Eats Your Community Project

I'm up at 2 a.m., scrolling through legal filings about WordPress, and I keep circling back to a memory from my old neighborhood: our community garden. It was a beautiful space, not flawless but full of life. Neighbors pitched in, kids learned to grow tomatoes, and older folks swapped herb cuttings. Then a developer bought the lot next door and started calling their luxury condos The Garden District. They used photos from our garden in marketing and told buyers they'd have access to community agriculture. The kicker? Not a single seed was ever planted.

That's basically what's happening with WordPress right now, but on a bigger stage. Instead of tomatoes, we're talking about the software that runs roughly 40% of the internet. And instead of a local developer, it's Silver Lake, the private equity firm that dropped $250 million to take control of WP Engine back in 2018.

I have to say, WordPress isn’t just software. It feels more like a huge experiment in collective ownership that somehow worked. Thousands of people building something together, sharing it freely, sticking with it because they believe the internet should belong to everyone. The WordPress Foundation, Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com), and all the volunteers have spent decades nurturing this thing. And it worked. Regular folks can spin up websites without begging permission from tech gatekeepers. Small businesses can exist online without paying rent to platform monopolies. And then Silver Lake steps into the picture.

According to the countersuit Automattic just filed, things changed once that $250 million check cleared. WP Engine started presenting itself as The WordPress Technology Company. Not a WordPress company (the WordPress company). They even let partners call them WordPress Engine, which feels a bit like naming a podcast network NPR Engine and acting surprised when people get confused. They rolled out products labeled Core WordPress and Headless WordPress, as if they were the ones actually keeping WordPress core alive.

So, you know what they weren’t doing? Contributing back. There’s this open-source tradition called Five for the Future, where companies pledge 5% of their resources to improve the commons they’re profiting from. WP Engine apparently decided that was optional.

I've seen this pattern enough times to sketch a flowchart. Private equity spots something people built together—a community space, a mutual aid network, an open source project—and immediately starts wondering how to extract value without contributing. How can they look like they're part of it while actually stripping it down? They're not even trying to hide it. The lawsuit says Silver Lake was trying to flip WP Engine for $2 billion. That's $2 billion, built on the confusion about who actually makes WordPress.

And look, I get it: companies have to make money. I do sponsor reads on podcasts from mattress brands to keep the lights on. But there’s a real difference between making money with a community and making money from a community, and that difference matters. When you tell people you are WordPress while the actual maintainers are over here patching security holes at 3 a.m. for free, that isn’t business. That’s colonization.

The wild part is that Silver Lake apparently even tried to sell WP Engine to Automattic itself. Imagine the audacity. You take the project's open-source name, profit from the confusion, you don't contribute back, and then you try to sell the whole operation back to the people you’ve been undermining? It’s like stealing someone’s bike, repainting it, and trying to resell it to them at a markup.

Matt Mullenweg, the WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO, is a figure that people describe differently depending on who you ask. He tried to work this out and even offered them a trademark license. It's standard business stuff; companies license protected names all the time. But Automattic says WP Engine merely pretended to negotiate, stalling because any real agreement would impact earnings. You can't have that quarterly report look weak when you're trying to flip the company for $2 billion.

Things got messy fast once Mullenweg started calling them out in public. WP Engine filed suit first, alleging extortion and abuse of power. More than 150 Automattic employees left voluntarily in protest of how aggressive he’d been. That’s something: people choosing unemployment over being part of something they simply couldn’t stomach.

Looking at these counterclaims, I keep wondering whether those employees had the full picture. Or perhaps they did and still thought the response was too harsh. Both things can be true. You can be right about someone taking from the commons and still be wrong about the way you push back.

What really gets to me is how this mirrors every other community fight I’ve covered. The patterns are the same, whether we’re talking about a neighborhood, a social movement, or a software project. Build something together, watch it take off, then watch money show up to extract value while contributing little in return. They always fall back on the same playbook: blur who they are, pretend they’re essential, and delay real accountability until they’re ready to cash out.

Open source (and, really, any commons) only works if people honor the social contract. Not the legal one, but the social one. The idea is simple: if you benefit, you contribute; if you profit, you support. The garden belongs to everyone who tends it, not to whoever can hire the best lawyers.

WP Engine pulled in half a billion dollars last year. Half a billion. Money earned from software they didn’t create, infrastructure they didn’t build, a community they didn’t nurture. And when asked to contribute 5% back, or to stop confusing people about who they were, they lawyered up instead.

I keep thinking about those 150 employees who left Automattic. What does it mean when the people defending the commons get so frustrated they become exactly what critics say they are: gatekeepers, bullies, owners of something meant to be owned by no one? But then what's the alternative? Let private equity hollow out every community project until there's nothing left but brands and confusion.

I don’t pretend there’s a clean answer here. There isn’t, really, when community meets capital. What I know for sure: every time we let extraction pass as contribution, every time we let confusion pass for clarity, we lose a little more of what makes these collective projects possible. WordPress matters because it showed we could build something massive and meaningful without corporate ownership. If we let that get swallowed by private equity, chasing name recognition, what comes next?

Your local mutual aid network, that community garden, or the open-source project you contribute to on weekends, they’re all vulnerable to the same playbook. Someone with money shows up, takes the name, grabs the credit, pockets the profits, and contributes nothing. Then when you complain, they call you entitled. When you fight back, they call you extreme.

Maybe you’re seen as extreme. Defending the commons can require a touch of extremism. Perhaps that’s the price we pay to keep some things free.

Maybe I’m overthinking this at 2 a.m., coffee cold and legal documents piled around me, trying to figure out why something built with love ends up getting eaten by someone’s exit plan. Either way, this isn’t just about WordPress. It’s about whether we still believe some things should belong to everyone.

The garden doesn't fix itself, and the internet doesn't either.