Matt Mullenweg is an American online entrepreneur, web developer and musician who has an estimated net worth of $40 million. Born Matthew Charles Mullenweg on January 11, 1984 in Houston, Texas, he attended the High School of Performing and Visual Arts. He was a drop out at the University of Houston with a major in Political Science in 2004. He then pursued a job at CNET Networks. He quit at CNET in late 2005 then founded Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, VaultPress, IntenseDebate, Polldaddy, and a lot more. Since then, he was a frequent speaker at conferences and events such as Northern Voice in Canada, global WorldCamp events, SxSW, BlogWorld Expo, Greek Blogger Camp, Tahoo TechDev Talk, Web 2.0 Submit, YCombinator’s Startup School, Le Web, etc.

WordPress started in 2002 when Mullenweg was 18 years old and had just begun to use the blog facility b2cafelog blog. However, the development of b2 had stopped. He was then contacted by Mike Little. Together, they started WordPress using the b2 codebase. Michel Valdrighi, the original b2 developer, soon joined them. In March 2004, he co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group along with Eric Meyer and Tantek Celik. Together with fellow WordPress developer Dougal Campbell, they launched Ping-O-Matic in April 2004.

Matt Mullenweg was named #16 in the list of the 50 most important people on the web by PC World in March 2007. He was a recipient of the Information Technology Innovator Award in 2008. He was an honorary patron of the University Philosophical Society. WordPress was awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in 2009. He received the Winner of the TechFellow Award in “Product Design and Marketing” in December 2010. He was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 for Social/Mobile in December 2011. He was included in the Forbes list of Most Influential Angel Investors on AngelList in May 2012. He was listed in 2012 Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Media in December 2012.