
Fired Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz told Fortune magazine that the folks at Yahoo “fucked me over“. By people she was referring to the Yahoo (YHOO) board.
There is the blow by blow details of how it unraveled:
Last evening, barely 24 hours after Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock called Bartz on her cell phone to tell her the news, she called from her Silicon Valley home (“There are reporters at the gate… a lot of them.”) to tell Fortune, exclusively, how the ax came down.
On Tuesday, Bartz was in New York, to speak at Citigroup’s (C) technology conference the next day, when she was supposed to call Bostock at 6 p.m. “I called him at 6:06,” she recalls. When he got on the line, she says, he started reading a lawyer’s prepared statement to dismiss her.
“I said, ‘Roy, I think that’s a script,’” adding, “‘Why don’t you have the balls to tell me yourself?’”
When Bostock finished reading, Bartz didn’t argue—”I got it. I got it,” she told the Yahoo chairman. “I thought you were classier,” she added.
Recruited in January 2009 after successfully building Autodesk (ADSK), Bartz never was the turnaround chief that the Yahoo board had wanted. Though she slashed costs and improved profit margins, she failed to improve revenue growth at a critical time when Yahoo has lost eyeballs and ad dollars to Google (GOOG) and Facebook. “They want revenue growth,” says Bartz about the Yahoo board, “even though they were told that we would not have revenue growth until 2012.”
As Bartz sees it, Yahoo’s search partnership with Microsoft (MSFT)—a deal she negotiated two years ago to offload costs—has Yahoo paying Microsoft 12% of its search revenue and limits current growth but will help the company long-term. She attributes the directors’ impatience to the criticism they faced when they turned down a lucrative deal to sell Yahoo to Microsoft in 2007, before she arrived. “The board was so spooked by being cast as the worst board in the country,” Bartz says. “Now they’re trying to show that they’re not the doofuses that they are.” (Bostock, who is vice chairman of Delta Air Lines (DAL) and on Morgan Stanley’s (MS) board as well as Yahoo’s, declined to comment.)
After Tuesday’s call from Bostock, Bartz says, she had two hours to let Yahoo know whether she would resign or allow the board to fire her. She called her husband, Bill, her three children–a son and two daughters—and her longtime assistant, Judy Flores. Learning that Yahoo’s lawyers had gone to the St. Regis hotel to hand her papers, she ditched that hotel and booked herself into another. “Am I stupid?!” she asks, making clear that she took her career crisis into her own hands.
It was that evening when she pulled out her iPad and wrote an email to Yahoo’s 14,000 employees:
To all,
I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.
CarolWhat does Bartz think of her successor, Tim Morse? “He’s a great guy,” she says. Morse was chief financial officer under Bartz, and now he is interim chief of a company whose stock has risen 6% since he replaced her. Asked whom she thinks the board might appoint long-term, she replies, “They should bring me in. I knew what to do.”
Sometimes it’s difficult to know when Bartz is being serious. As I prod her to tell me what she might do next, I mention her age, 63—”fuck you, yeah,” she replies. And when I ask her if she’s on any other public company boards besides Cisco (CSCO), where she is lead independent director, she says, “I’m on Yahoo’s board.” She tells me that she plans to remain a Yahoo director—which might be unlikely since she has now called her fellow directors “doofuses.”
“I want to make sure that the employees don’t believe that I’ve abandoned them. I would never abandon them,” Bartz says. Besides, she adds, “I have way too many purple clothes.”
She’s referring to the color of Yahoo’s logo. “I wish the Yahoo people the best,” she adds, “because it’s a fantastic franchise.”
Channels: carol bartz, Terry Semel, Yahoo

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She's right, they fucked her.
That board should be dumped and Filo and Yang taken out of management.
They don't know what the fuck yhey are doing.
Turning down $35B from MS cuz Yang fancied himself a sharp poker player?
Remember that? Hoo-boy.
And why is that reporter asking about her fucking age??
Comment by JimBob — September 8, 2011 @ 11:53 AM
Bartz was a complete fuck up. She know nothing about the internet business.
Comment by carol farts — September 8, 2011 @ 12:34 PM
Too bad she was not fired sooner.
Comment by carol farts — September 8, 2011 @ 12:34 PM
Face to face is always better…
Comment by Adam — September 8, 2011 @ 1:19 PM
Carol Farts, you stink!
She was a complete fuckup, like Chambers at Cisco, who for 10 years made 100+ stupid purchases of small companies to boost revenue, while keeping the stock flat and paying himself and cronies hundreds of millions of boni?
or Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide Financial; or Chris gronet at Solyndra? How about the bright boys at Groupon? How about Ken Lewis at BA?
I could easily list 50 more from the past few years who were real, big-time fuckups.
But none of them, to my knowledge, were fired with a phone call from 3000 miles away, or fired at all, for that matter.
The board, Filo and Yang should be dumped, right along with her. They made the decsions to hire her, they have no ideas of what to do and they turned down $35B!
Let's get a sense of proportion here, for fuck's sake!
Comment by Ralph Budd — September 8, 2011 @ 2:53 PM
carol bartz, thought, and probably she was right, that by uttering salty-words ( with F , A & S ) she would impress man dominated executive world. She did to some extent. But the fact is : she knew NOTHING on how to run a internet giant like Yahoo! She "revived" autodesk, because she worked there for a loooong time. Under her leadership, lots of true Yahoo! talents left yahoo for good! Only jack-ass Managers remained who usually torture the employees. I will not shed any tear that Carol was let go. She did let go many Yahoo! Engineers , having no fault of their own. Carol was earning US$13+million per year, for doing nothing and just giving incoherent lectures. Lets bring in Meg Whitman ( of ex-e-Bay) along with some old-time yahoo! talents …
Comment by Deb — September 9, 2011 @ 10:34 PM