What is it about Automattic's structure that lets Matt stay in control? Even Travis got ousted at Uber, and he was the primary founder. Is the company set up in a way that makes removing Matt very difficult?

Don’t underestimate Matt’s disregard for corporate theatre. A board voting to remove a CEO isn’t like firing an employee, there’s an assumption that obviously the founder would not use their elevated access to retaliate. As noted, Matt controls the majority of the voting stock, but he also controls WordPress as a whole. Removing the founder who controls everything against their wishes is basically impossible. Even if removing his access to Automattic’s corporate systems was possible, it takes one “I’ll revoke Automattic’s license to use the WordPress.com domain” to convince the board to blink and Matt is back. Mutually assured destruction. The board probably underestimated just how petty Matt is.

Travis, Altman, they’re egotistical but ultimately respect corporate theatre, they know that circumventing it is a bad idea, that one must participate in the grand performance, as Altman did. Matt doesn’t care, he’ll do as he pleases regardless of the consequences.

If Matt was a rationale shareholder he would know that what he has done here is a death sentence for Automattic but alas he does not care. Matt will watch Automattic burn before he lets anyone usurp him. The irony is that as a supposed open source advocate, he’s harming open source, he’s showing how dangerous it is for investors to invest in the corporate arm of an open source project when the founder has absolute control over the project.

He controls roughly 84% of the share-stakeholder votes.

Shares. Boards have a lot of power but end of the day the shareholders can remove the board so have the ultimate veto