What is Matt Mullenweg's Net Worth and Salary?
Matt Mullenweg is an American online social media entrepreneur and web developer who has a net worth of $400 million. Matt Mullenweg is best-known as the lead developer of the free and open source blogging platform WordPress which is managed by The WordPress Foundation. He is also the founder of Automattic, Inc., the for-profit web development arm of WordPress.com. In 2009 Matt reportedly turned down a $200 million offer to sell Automattic. In August 2019 Matt announced that Automattic had acquired Tumblr for $3 million. He also announced Automattic was acquiring 200+ Tumblr employees. His empire also operates Gravatar, Akismet, and Crowdsignal. Among his other endeavors, Mullenweg worked at CNET and co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group, which wrote the first of the microformats in 2003. As of this writing Automattic has raised $986 million over a dozen rounds and its most-recent valuation is $1.2 billion.
Early Life and Education
Matthew Charles Mullenweg was born on January 11, 1984 in Houston, Texas. As a teenager, he went to the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, where he studied jazz saxophone. Mullenweg went on to attend the University of Houston as a political science major, but dropped out in 2004 to pursue his business career.
WordPress
While Mullenweg was a freshman in college in 2003, he and English developer Mike Little launched WordPress, a free and open-source content management system. Originally created for blog publishing, the platform grew over the years to support various other types of web content, including mailing lists, media galleries, online stores, and learning management systems. In late 2004, Mullenweg was recruited by CNET to bring WordPress to the website and help the company with blogs and other media offerings.
Global Multimedia Protocols Group
Also while still in college, Mullenweg co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group with Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik. The group wrote the first of the microformats, XFN, and developed methods to represent human relationships through the XHTML Friends Network.
Stephen McCarthy / SPORTSFILE
Automattic
In the summer of 2005, Mullenweg founded Automattic to operate his growing portfolio of web services. His first major brand released through the company was Akismet, which works to filter spam from online comments, trackbacks, and contact form messages. Shortly after that, Mullenweg launched WordPress.com, a platform for self-publishing that grew into the most popular host for blogging in the world. In early 2014, Mullenweg succeeded Toni Schneider as CEO of Automattic.
Since its founding, Automattic has expanded exponentially by raising millions of dollars in venture capital and making many high-profile acquisitions. It has added to its portfolio such brands as Longreads, Gravatar, Sensei, Cloudup, WPScan, Newspack, and Jetpack. Other notable assets include the microblogging and social networking website Tumblr; the personal journaling app Day One; and the technology company Parse.ly, which provides web analytics and content optimization software to online publishers.
Speaking Gigs
Beyond his entrepreneurial projects, Mullenweg does regular speaking engagements at events around the world. He has presented at WorldCamp events, SxSW, the Lean Startup Conference, and YCombinator's Startup School, among other places.
Honors and Awards
Mullenweg has earned numerous honors for his contributions to technology and business. In 2008, he received the Information Technology Innovator Award from Temple University. Over the subsequent years, he appeared on several lists of the most influential people on the web, including lists by BusinessWeek, Business Insider, and Forbes.
Philanthropy
On the philanthropic side of things, Mullenweg supports such non-profit organizations as the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Long Now Foundation, and the Innocence Project. He has also made major donations to the group Charity: Water and the "Bay Lights" art installation in San Francisco.
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