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I'm also very curious, given his other statements and how he seems to conflate actions of the foundation, automattic, his own person, and wordpress.org, whether these contributions are his or one of theirs. And to what causes, at that; can you give to your own foundation, I wonder?

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The contributions are legit. Despite his claim to have never spoken publicly about his contributions before, he has spoken about them (when it was convenient to make a point about his moral superiority). He donated hundreds of thousands per year to the Apache Foundation, for example. Additionally the WordPress Foundation’s financials are public, they don’t receive many donations (tens of thousands per year).

Huh, that's very interesting - https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205...

I though part of Matt's point was that Automattic "gave back" to the foundation?

The WordPress Foundation is irrelevant to WordPress itself, it just holds events. The WordPress project is owned by Matt and that’s what Automattic donates to (in the form of Automattic employees working roughly 4k hours per week on the WordPress project). There’s also the money spent on running WordPress.org by Automattic but that’s entirely opaque (nobody knows how much it is, although it’s claimed to be millions).

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