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Recently dismissed Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz didn’t pull any punches or give her recent boot from the ailing search engine the corporate gloss-over in her first interview following the much-discussed firing.
In a notably frank assessment absent of the typical mutual niceties seen after a high-profile CEO departure, Bartz laid bare her feelings on the firing without reservation, recounting a tale that’s probably as cringe-worthy to read as it was to experience. Bartz says she was expecting a phone call at 6PM with Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock, and rang him at 6:06. When the call was connected, he began to read a prepared legal statement to her.
Bartz said she was straightforward with him, too, recalling:
“I said, ‘Roy, I think that’s a script.Why don’t you have the balls to tell me yourself?”
At the end of the call, she says she got in a bit of a parting jab:
“I got it. I got it… I thought you were classier.”
Bartz says that she doesn’t want her employees to think she’d abandoned them, and says that the board expected gains she said from the outset weren’t possible until 2012. But as for the situation as a whole, she fumed:
“These people fucked me over.”
When the Fortune reporter mentioned her age, 63, in relation to future plans, Bartz retorted, “fuck you, yeah.” But the former Yahoo chief says she wishes Yahoo employees well, and that the company is a “fantastic franchise.”
