Matt, put down the lawsuit and pick up Gutenberg

I've been watching the WP Engine vs. Automattic saga drag on, and I keep coming back to one thought: lawsuits are an expensive toy that only the very, very rich get to play with.

Matt Mullenweg has built serious wealth. He can file suits left and right, for whatever reason he likes, and absorb the cost without blinking. The reason this time seems to be that he feels slighted — that the community, in his eyes, hasn't given enough back to WordPress. And maybe there's a real grievance buried in there somewhere. But watching a man who has essentially everything still choose to spend his days on this comes across as petty. Small, even.

What gets me most is the opportunity cost.

Every hour, every dollar, every bit of mental bandwidth poured into litigation is an hour, a dollar, a bit of bandwidth not spent making WordPress better. And WordPress needs the help. There was a moment on a podcast where Matt tried to build a simple page in Gutenberg, live, with his own creation — and it was painful to watch. He couldn't put together something basic, quickly, in the very tool that's supposed to be WordPress's future.

Now imagine if the energy behind these lawsuits had gone into fixing that instead. We'd probably have a far healthier product today. Instead, the money, the mindspace, and the stress have all flowed into something fundamentally unproductive.

And here's the honest truth about lawsuits: the only party that reliably comes out richer is the legal system itself. Not the end users who actually run WordPress sites. Not the people working at Automattic. And, I'd argue, not even Mullenweg himself — who I suspect would, deep down, rather spend that time on his relationships, on improving WordPress, on traveling to Japan, on whatever it is that actually makes his life good.

Yes, I get it — at his level you can run feuds like this and still have a great life. But a lawsuit eats your mindspace no matter how rich you are. It just does. There's no net worth high enough to make a multi-year legal fight feel light.

That's what makes this such a waste. Because I genuinely think Matt Mullenweg is a talented guy who could still make something beautiful out of WordPress. Just not like this. Not by weaponizing the legal system. This is a waste of everyone's time — his, WP Engine's, the community's.

Honestly, I'd love to sit down with him. Not to fight, but to swap ideas about how WordPress could actually get better. I'd love his take on SailWP, which is our attempt to solve a lot of the problems WordPress has been sitting on for a decade — the AI co-pilot you can just talk to, SEO and multilanguage and GDPR baked in from the start, a cloud layer to manage all your sites from one place.

But as long as he keeps his head in the sand, going from lawsuit to lawsuit, that conversation probably isn't happening.

Still — I'm hoping for better days.