But seriously if I had to recommend something, not escalating seems best for everyone involved.
The only thing he has that can't be moved or recreated are the trademarks. In an extremely short span of time everyone went from Xfree for their X server to Xorg, and Xfree limped along for a bit before falling over. This is the beauty of open source.
While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board, executing that move would ignite a corporate civil war rather than a clean transition of power.
This is very unlikely. True Ventures almost certainly controls at least one seat. (Until Phil Black left last year they actually held two seats, but that doesn't mean they had the right to. Either way, at the moment it's just Toni Schneider.)
In this case? Possibly! Ann Dunwoody and Sue Decker look like independents, and he might be able to unilaterally replace either or both of them.
I don't think that's really right, but it's hard to tell. In my mind, as someone who was there from 2004-2011, things were going ok while she was there. The Microsoft acquisition would have been nice from a $ point of view, and I think they could have been convinced to give all the employeed an Xbox 360, but Microsoft would have smothered the brand and its products... It's possible the acquisition would have been held up in anti-trust for a long time and a large period of uncertainty.
IMHO the running into the ground really started under Carol Bartz with the ads and search deal with Microsoft whereby Bing was supposed to take over everything. But performance in terms of latency, quality, and $/search was worse than when Yahoo was doing it and the ads and search teams at Yahoo didn't shrink as expected, because the work didn't shrink as expected. Not surprisingly, when you drop revenue and don't drop costs, financial performance does not improve.
Partnering with Google would have made more financial sense, but that wasn't an option because of anti-trust... Probably should have accepted the acquisition and accepted fate... partnering with Microsoft later was a bad choice, maybe they could have backed out once the numbers were clear.
Investors tell you to put them on the board and you do it. The worst mistake WordPress made was taking investment from private equity and assorted Wall Street types.