WordPress History - The Early Years 

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is modern software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope that by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.

• 2001 - b2 cafelog launched by Michel Valdrighi.
• 2003 - Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little fork b2 and create WordPress.
• Present - Matt Mullenweg controls the WordPress empire (estimated worth in the $Billions) through his company, AutoMattic. Mike Little conducts WordPress training and consulting in the UK. According to published reports, Little has no financial interest or stake in WordPress or AutoMattic.