Matt's message reads:
> They had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above.
So they could have "paid" by just hiring a few WordPress devs to work on it. That is: not necessarily by transferring dollars to Automattic.
IMHO this is an important bit of nuance missing in this thread.