Matt Mullenweg

NOTABLE QUOTES:

"I'm engaged in the biggest corporate battle of my life with a private equity firm, Silver Lake, which has $102 billion under management."

"When open source works, it becomes like 90 to 95% of the market."

Auren Hoffman (00:00.706)

Hello, fellow Data Nerds. My guest today is Matt Mullenweg. Matt is the CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress. WordPress powers roughly about 40 % of all websites. Matt, welcome to World of Dass

Matt(00:13.242)

Thank you so much for having me on.

Auren Hoffman (00:14.818)

Now I'm really excited. this is kind of a different than our normal episodes where we're actually diving into something that's like super topical that's going on right now. And real, real, real, like super real time. and often we'll like kind of like tape one of these and then we'll go live like two months later, but we're like doing this like in the middle of the maelstrom and, and you like, and, for, for maybe not everyone who's listening is familiar with what's going on, but right now.

Matt(00:23.248)

Real time. That's all that will happen.

Matt(00:33.968)

time.

Auren Hoffman (00:43.724)

WordPress and automatic where you are is in some sort of like lawsuit with another company called WP engine.

Matt(00:48.976)

my goodness. I'm engaged in the biggest corporate battle of my life with a private equity firm, Silver Lake, which has $102 billion under management. and their company, they own WP engine and they've been attacking me from every corner. They're not doing podcasts like this by the way. but I am. And, yeah. So that's why I'm coming home.

Auren Hoffman (01:12.878)

Well, I really appreciate it. So yeah, kind of walk us through, like, just give it, let people just understand the kind of context of like how this got to this point, what the backstory was. And then we can talk about how it gets resolved.

Matt(01:28.698)

Sure, so there is a business called WP Engine, which many people, including my own mother, thought was WordPress Engine or officially associated with WordPress. And so we tried to get them to...

Auren Hoffman (01:40.93)

Yep. And they were like built on like a skin of WordPress originally. Is that kind of the idea? Yep.

Matt(01:46.224)

Yeah. Yeah. And so we tried to get them to get a trademark license and they kept delaying delaying delaying delaying. And now they built this business to be pretty big. Four hundred million plus. the business, 1100 employees owned by Silver Lake, which is a private equity firm, bought it in 2018. So they've they've run this.

Auren Hoffman (02:00.558)

$400 million revenue. Okay, that's a pretty big business. Yeah.

Matt(02:15.482)

play for a while while abusing our trademarks.

Auren Hoffman (02:20.078)

And I assume like you guys have, I don't know the backstory, like, I assume you guys have talked to them over many years about this, right? It's not just like just come up today, right?

Matt(02:29.04)

We've been trying to get them to have a trademark license for many years and they can't believe this.

Auren Hoffman (02:32.94)

And I assume it's in their best interest to not do it, right? They would just prefer not to do it, right?

Matt(02:38.064)

They would, have ladies on, I think they were trying to maybe flip the asset this year or something. They couldn't sell it. So, I don't know. I can speak for them, but yeah, we were really trying to get a license in place because it's very confusing to people. know, as examples, like in CNBC art girl, we're a close friend of mine, our Berkowitz, who I've known for 15 years was hosted on WP agent and thought it was me. And so when he heard all the news, he was like, switching all my sites.

Auren Hoffman (02:52.663)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (03:03.671)

Uh-huh.

Matt(03:07.723)

I thought that was you.

Auren Hoffman (03:11.222)

Interesting. And so the main dispute is just kind of simple that like, there's confusion in the market. If I called myself like Nike engine or something like that and had like a shoe thing, then I probably owe a little bit of money at least to Nike corporate shoe. Like that's where it started.

Matt(03:31.544)

He did the trademark license. Yeah, it says log vision to marketplace. And I think they've been able to build their business to be this large on that confusion. So many people have told me on that they thought WP Engine was us. So they thought they were signed up with us. So

Auren Hoffman (03:33.411)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (03:40.535)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (03:50.348)

Now there's another kind of like that's, that's part of the dispute. And then there's another one, which is like, Hey, like open, like, like WordPress is an open source project and automatic contributes massively to making the, the, the, the project better. You contribute tons of hours and tons of time. Whereas WP engine was not contributing to the open source project. Is that right?

Matt(04:14.308)

Well, that's the whole other thing is that so automatic in its history as a very open source, open web company. So we devote over a hundred full-time people to dedicate just to open source. we push, I think we maintain six or 7 million lines of of public.

Auren Hoffman (04:37.678)

Because WordPress, you could just use open source, right? You could use it for free if you choose to. Yeah.

Matt(04:40.354)

Yeah. And they use the WordPress open source just fine. So they don't publish any, they don't maintain open source code like we do. So we publish a large amount of open source code. They just sort of take our code and sell it to their customers with the WP Engine branding, which people think is WordPress engine.

Auren Hoffman (05:04.022)

Now, if they were called instead of WP engine, if they were called like website engine or something like that, would that solve the problem or do you think there's still a problem that like kind of goes in there?

Matt(05:18.672)

think that they were going to website engine, that would be, or if they for toward press and called it something different, you know, they could do that under the GPL. That would be totally fine. I'm the trademark law. I'm not a lawyer, so I won't speak for my lawyers, but I think that feels fair.

Auren Hoffman (05:24.022)

Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (05:32.524)

Yeah.

Got it. So the main, really the main dispute is like, is, that WP kind of piece of it? Okay. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. The WordPress. Yeah.

Matt(05:42.636)

No, it's not WP. It's WordPress. And the other thing, WordPress, and it's funny because when private equity comes in, they often do not just one bad thing, but a lot of bad things. So Silverlake has been a bad steward of many other open source communities. And so they weren't just abusing the WordPress trademark. They were actually also abusing the WooCommerce trademark.

Auren Hoffman (05:57.196)

Yeah.

Matt(06:09.52)

I don't know if you know what WooCommerce is. WooCommerce is an open-source Shopify that is fully owned by automatic. There's no confusion or anything. And they were also messaging that trademark. So the deal we offered them was for a license for the Woo WordPress and the WordPress WooCommerce trademarks.

Auren Hoffman (06:11.126)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (06:18.967)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (06:29.556)

Okay, got it. Okay, interesting. like, and it seems like there's like an easy path to resolve this, like either they just pay a license fee or they change their name, right? Like, and then it's like, then it's resolved like that. Like, why is this, why has this become so public?

Matt(06:44.688)

I would have loved to have done a deal. By the way, this has been really stressful for me. I've been running WordPress for 21 years with very little drama and you don't hear about any drama in the press from WordPress.

Auren Hoffman (06:48.012)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (07:02.486)

Yeah, I've known you for a very long time. You're kind of a low drama guy. You're not. There are certain people in the tech community who are known for their like creating drama. You're not one of those.

Matt(07:13.226)

Honestly, Orin, where I feel a little silly is that they just strung me along for so long. I kept believing they were going to do a deal. And they just kind of like...

Auren Hoffman (07:20.462)

okay. So they kept kind of like engaging, engaging, but then it didn't, it didn't happen.

Matt(07:24.528)

Yeah, that's why we had them. They were even a sponsor of our big annual conference, Work Camp US. And the reason they were a sponsor, because I thought by the time the conference happens, we'll have a deal done.

Auren Hoffman (07:32.984)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (07:41.961)

Interesting. Well, I mean, and that, you know, in some ways, like, that's what a good business is supposed to do in some ways is do it. But then on the other side, like they, they, you know, maybe they're playing too much hardball or, kind of, could have kind of put this to bed.

Matt(07:56.773)

You know, I think there's a fair business deal to be had. Maybe they don't like the 8%. They could have negotiated a different percentage or whatever, but like,

Auren Hoffman (08:04.482)

Are you asking for like a percentage of their revenues or something?

Matt(08:07.62)

So the term sheet we published was 8 % of their revenue, and they could have a trademark license. Now, that could have all been negotiated. We could have talked about it. Whatever. That's just business.

Auren Hoffman (08:16.504)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (08:20.854)

Yep. Yeah, maybe they would have come out at 4 % and you guys would have or they could have changed their name.

Matt(08:27.424)

And we gave them an option. So that's the thing. We said, you don't just have to pay us for the trademark license. If you want to donate hours into the open source community, you can do that too. We'll credit you. Yeah. So you don't have to give me any money. You don't have to me a dollar. If you want to spend 30 million a year on engineers making WordPress better, you can do that and I'll give you credit. So.

Auren Hoffman (08:39.072)

Instead, yeah, yeah, I will credit you.

Auren Hoffman (08:52.078)

All right. Okay. And they're probably spending a lot on engineers anyway. It's just like donating some of those engineers back so that everyone benefits from it.

Matt(09:00.054)

I can only speculate, you know, this private equity is good at running companies. So like, this is a company that had, you know, I would estimate this deal would have been less than their free cashflow.

Auren Hoffman (09:16.93)

Yeah. And what is this? And you put the blame squarely on like Silver Lake. You think it's their kind of they're the ones who kind of made this happen. How do you kind of think of it?

Matt(09:29.796)

You know, Arn, I've been in business a long time. I'm used to people being very direct and saying what they mean. I'm not sure whether it was Heather Bruner, the CEO, who was telling me something and similarly something else. As a financial, as a fiduciary, they should have done this deal. They're probably gonna lose more than 8 % of their customers. Overall, it's bad press. So, like, it would have been an obvious deal to do.

But there's something in there that was not well communicated.

Auren Hoffman (10:03.778)

And then, okay, so then kind of walk me through. So like about a month ago, you kind of went on WordCamp. You kind of made this public. most people, including me, were not aware of this dispute before you made it public. And kind of walk me through kind of what's happened since.

Matt(10:22.906)

So I will say that like, you know, I've maintaining the WordPress trademark for 21 years now. I have never had an issue with anyone else. And usually when there's trademark issues, you just pick up the phone, you call, you talk about it. You say like, hey, don't do this, don't do that. Like, no need to get lawyers involved. By the way, we didn't even file the first lawsuits, they did. So.

Auren Hoffman (10:28.056)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (10:36.684)

Yeah, talk about it. Yeah

Auren Hoffman (10:47.959)

Yeah.

Matt(10:49.744)

And they filed it not just against Automatic, but against me personally, which I run WordPress.org. So it's affecting the whole WordPress community is being attacked by their legal lawfare, you know?

Auren Hoffman (10:57.356)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (11:05.536)

Now, and then, and then at some point there's been this press about like, like, okay, there somehow you're, or at least there's been some press that, that the, that their product has been degraded in some sort of way over the last few weeks, or they're not getting access to certain things now, or walk me through kind of like that response.

Matt(11:31.028)

So they have been trying to muddy the story as much as possible to say like, is about the GPL or forking or something like that. trying to, they're really trying to make a lot of confusion about this. But so, and it turns out, you know, we got a reference for a crisis PR firm and there was someone's like, Hey, you got to work with these folks.

Auren Hoffman (11:35.725)

Yeah.

Matt(11:59.536)

And I was like, great. All this like kind of crazy PR stuff. And when we called them, they said, sorry, we can't work with you. We're conflicted. So they have a very sophisticated operation, which is trying to make this saying that I'm a terrible person, that I'm capricious, that I'm extorting them, that I'm like, you know, whatever it is, they're trying to make this, I'm hurting their customers.

Auren Hoffman (12:28.076)

It's interesting because like there's been a, there's been probably a hundred now articles about this, this dispute. And you can clearly see some of them are like clearly on one side and some of them are clearly on the other. Like they've got the flax going and it's like, it's like a real, it's like behind the scenes, like, know, all this money is being spent on PR and everything.

Matt(12:44.022)

man, they boxed my bric-

Well, one of the funny things was I, again, maybe I was fools. I thought Heather was interviewed for a job at Automatic. And so the CEO of WP Engine, so Heather Brunner, CEO of WP Engine. And so they leaked my...

Auren Hoffman (13:04.65)

By the way, who I know and I like, I've known her for a long time and she seems like a nice person. Yeah.

Matt(13:08.81)

I thought so too. So, yeah, they leaked my private test. They doxed my text to her. They didn't show all of them, obviously. They just showed the ones that make, to try to make it look bad. By the way, I have not leaked any of their private communications at all. Please note that. But the...

Auren Hoffman (13:22.476)

Make you look bad. Yeah.

Matt(13:38.67)

Yeah, if you look at the thread, it was basically saying, so Heather had been interviewing, I thought she was interviewing for a job to run WordPress out of work. And she told me, like, hey, I can't do this because I built this team at WP Engine. I would love to join and run WordPress out of Oregon. But I built this team.

But Silverlake's probably, you know, they only are going to hold the asset for six, seven years. They're probably going to transition. When I retire, I would love to like run WordPress on a work in the future. I was like, awesome. That's great. Again, I was on, I was so supportive of the WP Engine a year ago. I went to their conference. I, I supported them. I was publicly doing everything to

Auren Hoffman (14:29.044)

Even then, was a, I assume there was still a trademark issue at that point already, right? Or no?

Matt(14:34.628)

But I thought it was going to be resolved because they kept saying like, hey, we'll fix this. We'll fix this. We'll fix this. and so I said, okay. So the text they leaked was me saying to Heather, well, okay, you said, you want to, you said Silver Lake is not allowing you to do this deal. Do you want to like do an open AI Microsoft thing? Like where like you come over.

Auren Hoffman (14:36.834)

Okay.

Auren Hoffman (14:40.621)

Hmm.

Matt(15:03.458)

and all your employees who want to follow you come over, we'll hire them all, you know? So.

Auren Hoffman (15:05.986)

Yeah, yep.

Auren Hoffman (15:10.03)

interesting. What

Matt(15:11.376)

And they leaked that to try to make me look bad, but really I was just in good faith trying to say what she, I thought she had said that she, you know, didn't want to leave her team behind. was like, okay, we'll bring your team with you. You know, if you, if you feel like you actually want to be aligned with open source principles and do this deal, like come on over and we'll, we'll hire the whole team too. Like it was going to be hard. Like they have a 1100 employees, but like I was ready to like make it work.

Auren Hoffman (15:24.654)

Uh-huh.

Auren Hoffman (15:40.718)

Okay, interesting. then there's this idea that like, at least for some clients of WP Engine, there's been like some sort of degradation of the WP Engine product because it's not working as well with WordPress. Like, can you walk us through that?

Matt(16:00.436)

So this is a little geeky. so all of WP Engine's servers were using free resources on WordPress.org to update their sites. So they were charging their customers and then using free services from WordPress.org to update their sites. When they filed a lawsuit against us and me, our data center people were like,

Auren Hoffman (16:25.218)

Mm-hmm.

Matt(16:29.232)

Let's block the network. Like there's some of those can't talk to our servers. right. You just.

Auren Hoffman (16:31.031)

Right.

Right, right. makes sense. Well, so they were, they were using, they were using, so it was almost like they were using like these API calls to wordpress.org or wordpress.com. And then they weren't, they were never paying for those or something or.

Matt(16:48.324)

They never paid, they never had a contract, they just free open, you know, network calls. And to serve their hundreds of thousands of customers that they were making 400 million plus on, you know. So we blocked their network. So basically their data server can talk to our data center. And they tried to make it like we were breaking their sites, but we're like, hey, you promised your customers that you could update your sites. You said,

Auren Hoffman (17:00.128)

Okay, interesting.

Auren Hoffman (17:07.628)

Yeah.

Matt(17:16.526)

promised them security and WordPress and manage WordPress and everything. So you should be able to do that. And they actually have been able to like make a sort of update server since then. So they took them like three or four days.

Auren Hoffman (17:21.09)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (17:30.702)

So basically, it's really about they can take the open source license. It's all GPL. So it's all open. They can take it. They can bring it into their own system. And then they can update it. And then they could push it out to their customers if they choose to do that. OK, so interesting, because in the end, this is really just a simple trademark dispute, essentially. And it seems like there should be a very simple

Matt(17:35.312)

Yeah, because it's cool, it's all GPL. It's all open source.

Matt(17:45.616)

Exactly.

Auren Hoffman (17:59.131)

A very, very simple way to resolve this dispute. There's some number or there's some kind of like, you know, thing to. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt(18:04.942)

This could have been a very easy deal. And we've done deals in the past with other hosts and we will do others in the future. But for some reason they just wouldn't do anything. So.

Auren Hoffman (18:17.934)

You retain Neil Katyal, who's also a good friend of mine, but I've also been a guest on this podcast for legal defense. Is that something like where you think this because he's like a kind of a high powered Supreme Court person. Do you think this goes to that kind of area or what's the legal side that could end up happening?

Matt(18:42.308)

Well, what does private equity Silver Lake try to do to bully open source people? They have Quinn Emmanuel, who is one of the scariest law firms ever. So I had to find someone who was bigger and badder than Quinn Emmanuel. And Will told me he was like, I've been adverse to Quinn 15 times. I've won every single time. I was like, all right, you're my guy.

Auren Hoffman (18:49.46)

Yeah, yep.

Auren Hoffman (18:57.569)

Yeah, okay, got it, okay.

Auren Hoffman (19:05.934)

Okay, all right. Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to go against Neil. He's amazing. Like he's definitely one of the he's probably one of the best lawyers of our generation

Matt(19:10.65)

He's amazing. So, and he took on this case and I'm very glad to have him on our side on the legal stuff. But honestly, the legal stuff will take years to play out. This is really like about confusion in the marketplace. Customers, they could end this tomorrow if they signed a deal. So.

Auren Hoffman (19:22.924)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (19:27.916)

Now, in some ways, like more people have heard about them now from this thing. Like they've gotten all this press. Again, a lot of it not good, but a lot of it now like, you know, in the adage, like no press is bad press. Like a lot of people have heard about them and never heard about them before.

Matt(19:45.358)

Well, and I want every single one of our customers to understand what WP Engine is and what WordPress is because they have been confusing their customers and complaining them and making them think that they're WordPress. And so what we're trying to do, I know this is messy. I know it's been not the best at PR or whatever, like it's, we're trying to really differentiate that there is WordPress and there is what WP Engine offers.

Auren Hoffman (19:52.483)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (20:12.866)

Now, how do you, cause there are other like content management system alternatives, then kind of that run, then those run on WordPress. can go to Webflow, you can go to other types of content management systems. Are you afraid that like it could embolden some of those, like some of those guys could go after it or, you know, and

Matt(20:32.272)

sure. All the competitors have been like, you know, they're so happy to be like, look at WordPress. There's a mess now come to Webflow. But you know what? When you switch, they're all proprietary. So if you go to Webflow, you're on a proprietary system. You're not open source anymore. we wrote a goal for you in a day.

Auren Hoffman (20:37.261)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (20:41.154)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (20:50.507)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt(20:54.672)

So open source gives you the security, the trust, the continuity, it's the future. It's why WordPress runs 43 % of all the websites in the world and why every other host in the world that runs WordPress, by the way, all of WVH competitors are perfectly happy to take your website and post it someplace else.

Auren Hoffman (21:10.754)

Yeah, of course.

But I still don't understand why, why has WordPress been so dominant? Like what is the, I don't get it. Like I, I, I, it's a good product. I'm not, you know, I think it's a, it's a very good product and, and, but there's a lot of good products out there that don't have the same level of market share that WordPress has. Like what, why, why did it happen the way it happened? Like you could see a lot of scenarios where it wouldn't have happened.

Matt(21:39.28)

That's a good question. So how open source works is that it basically, it's like the Wikipedia. It allows all of humanity to get behind a common solution and make it better. you know, TikTok and Facebook and Snapchat all run on Linux, right? They don't all make their own operating systems. So, but...

Auren Hoffman (21:51.523)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (22:03.404)

Yep. Of course. Yep.

Matt(22:08.968)

I know that sounds kind of ridiculous. I just said it, but that's open source working. When you don't think about it, that's when open source works. So it's the same thing. Like websites are sort of coalescing around WordPress as a standard, as the operating system for the web. You know, we've run anything from a tiny blog to whitehouse.gov. And that's kind of like the operating system of the web. And so yeah, it's open source. So you could, that's the standard.

Auren Hoffman (22:10.797)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (22:38.646)

I'm still I know it's always what I know. It's like it's just shocking to me that like there's a CMS that has that high of a market share that's out there. And and and you just don't see that in many other kind of scenarios.

Matt(22:54.946)

You actually see it in a lot of other scenarios if you look at sort of browser engine. No, no, Chromium usage. like, if you look at the browser engines, there's Chrome, but there's also Brave and Arc and all the other browsers that use the Chromium engine, which have, think, like 90 % of market share. Look at it with Linux, look at it with databases. When open source works, it becomes like 90 to 95 % of the market. There's always going to be others.

Auren Hoffman (22:58.274)

Okay, guess if you're like SMTP or something like that or yeah. Yep, chromium, good point. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (23:07.98)

Yep.

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (23:17.602)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (23:22.828)

Yeah.

Matt(23:22.948)

But like everyone kind of says, okay, there's this like main thing that we all work on and make it really secure, safe, awesome, open, transparent. And let's all just work on that thing. And then let's do other stuff on top of it, you know?

Auren Hoffman (23:32.258)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (23:36.334)

So this is like maybe Android would be an example or something like that as well.

Matt(23:40.238)

And we'll see what happens, if that gets spun out of Google or whatever. Actually, you can't actually right now.

Auren Hoffman (23:43.501)

Yeah.

No, automatic has been, it's a private company. and it's a super, you know, impressive company on itself. Like, how do you think about, like, should it be, would you prefer it at some point to be a public company? Like, how do you think about that?

Matt(24:01.732)

Cool. We've had a lot of interest in automatic shares. We have an amazing program. So if you're an employee of automatic, we actually have a very special program where you can buy shares. It's called the A12 stock program. You can buy shares and you can sell them every six months and they have a one X liquidation preference. And even if you leave the company, you can still sell them for the rest of your life.

So the company maintains an internal market for those shares. Now, I would love to...

Auren Hoffman (24:32.333)

And you buy them from other you buy them, you sell them to other employees and other ex employees or, can I go buy them as, a

Matt(24:39.364)

the company. Yeah. So it's a little complicated to get into right now. But like we yeah, we have this great stock program and I would love for more people to be able to own automatic in the future.

Auren Hoffman (24:54.424)

by the is that like a phantom stock? Because I assume at some point you can't have like tens of thousands of owners and then you kind of forced to go public or something. okay. Interesting. Okay. Yeah.

Matt(25:01.744)

It's not a Vanna stock, it's real stock. So I'll walk you through the legal stuff later, because I think you actually find it pretty fascinating. I think the company should do more of this. But it's pretty cool. In terms of more owners of automatic, yeah, maybe we'll spin up something. I thought about doing something like AngelList, where we could do one of those roll up vehicles. People could like, accredited investors could do something. Because it is true that we've been very closely held.

Auren Hoffman (25:22.667)

huh.

Matt(25:31.408)

We have only a few investors. know, it's me, Bernardo Ngo, Tiger, Salesforce. I'm now going to fail because I'm not going to list all of them. We have amazing investors, but there's only a few of them. You can count them on your hands and feet. So I would love to...

Auren Hoffman (25:31.458)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (25:57.134)

Do you agree, like there are these people like Bill Gurley, like, the company should definitely go public. And, you know, where do you kind of fall on that debate?

Matt(26:05.686)

I think companies should do what's right for their customers. So whatever they need for capital. So our capital needs have been amply met by the private markets and yeah, companies should do what's right for their customers.

Auren Hoffman (26:08.897)

Okay.

Auren Hoffman (26:21.366)

Okay, so there's no like, it's not like, you know, if you want to stay private, stay private, whatever, whatever you think is like the best isn't in the best interest of your customer, of your of your customer.

Matt(26:33.144)

Yeah, of course, investors want you to go public, That's their interest. You always focus on your customer first.

Auren Hoffman (26:35.597)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (26:40.62)

Okay, interesting. Now what, and now that you're kind of in the midst of this like PR craziness and stuff like that, you know, we always ask on this program, if there are conspiracy theories that people believe, are you more apt to believe in conspiracy theories now?

Matt(26:59.408)

I have seen some really amazing dark PR stuff, so I've never been in the center of a misinformation campaign.

Auren Hoffman (27:10.114)

Yeah, there's a lot of people who are good at this dark arts of PR.

Matt(27:13.804)

And I've seen like Twitter accounts with 20,000 followers with no posts. Suddenly become active and start posting memes about me and stuff like that.

Auren Hoffman (27:19.406)

Uh-huh. interesting. they're they have these like Dorman things that they've been waiting for a while to that's smart sleeper sleeper cell Twitter Twitter accounts.

Matt(27:27.483)

my goodness.

I think they're spending probably 100 to 150 grand a month on Crisis Dark PR itself.

Auren Hoffman (27:38.318)

I mean, that would probably be the minimum that they're going to be spending more than that, I would presume. Yeah. Yeah. This has been great. Thank you. Thank you, Matt Muller. By the way, I follow you on X. I'm a huge fan of yours. I know this has been kind of a quick thing, but I really appreciate you coming on Roll with Ass.

Matt(27:43.364)

Well, thank you so much for talking. I gotta run some other meetings, but like.

Matt(28:00.356)

Thank you.

Auren Hoffman (28:01.57)

Yeah, thanks, Matt.