WP Engine Trademark Battle

Matt Mullenweg shares the story of how WP Engine's relationship with WordPress changed after being acquired by private equity.

"There's a company called WP Engine that started off very positive in the community. Jason Cohen, who started it, is awesome. But in 2019, they were bought by a private equity firm called Silver Lake. Over the subsequent five years, they started becoming more parasitic of WordPress, creating confusion in the marketplace with their marketing and branding in a way that threatened our trademark.

People would say 'Oh, it's WordPress Engine' and they wouldn't correct them. Even my close friends who were WP Engine customers thought it was my company. I would frequently get support requests for WP Engine like 'my site's down.'

For two years prior to this fight, we tried our best to partner with them and resolve the trademark issues, but they weren't responding. Then it turned out while we thought we were negotiating in good faith, they were preparing a legal case. Three days after I gave a presentation, they launched a huge lawsuit with Quinn Emanuel, one of the biggest, nastiest law firms.

They're actually not even the largest WordPress web host - probably the sixth or seventh largest with about 700,000-800,000 users, which is a single-digit percentage of all WordPress sites in the world. Their PR firm has managed to make this into a bigger thing than it is, but I expect this to resolve in the next few months."