WASHINGTON—Fired Yahoo! chief executive Carol Bartz has responded to her dismissal with a characteristically salty blast at the board of directors of the Internet company.
“These people fucked me over,” Bartz said in an exclusive interview with Fortune magazine, her first since she was fired over the telephone by Yahoo! chairman Roy Bostock on Tuesday.
Bartz said she received the call from Bostock in New York on Tuesday evening and he was reading a prepared statement from a lawyer.
“I said, ‘Roy, I think that’s a script,'” she told Fortune. “‘Why don’t you have the balls to tell me yourself?'”
Bartz said that when Bostock finished reading, she told him: “I thought you were classier.”
Bartz said Yahoo!’s board wants revenue growth “even though they were told that we would not have revenue growth until 2012.”
She said members of the board were impatient because of the criticism they received for turning down a $47 billion takeover offer from Microsoft before she joined.
“The board was so spooked by being cast as the worst board in the country,” Bartz said. “Now they’re trying to show that they’re not the doofuses that they are.”
Bartz, a former chief executive of business software company Autodesk, was hired in January 2009 to engineer a turnaround at Yahoo! but was fired with more than a year remaining on her contract.
Chief financial officer Timothy Morse was named interim chief executive while the board of directors searches for a new CEO.
“He’s a great guy,” Bartz said of Morse.
Yahoo! shares rose more than five percent on Wall Street on Wednesday following Bartz’s firing and amid renewed speculation of a sale of all or part of the Sunnyvale, California-based company.
Yahoo! shares were up 2.90 percent at $14.01 in early afternoon trading on Thursday.
Bartz significantly cut costs at Yahoo! but was faulted by investors and analysts for failing to articulate a clear strategic vision for the company on the quickly shifting Internet landscape.