When Carol Bartz announced that she'd been dismissed as Yahoo's CEO (over a phone call, no less), she quickly left her hotel and scribbled an email on her iPad to blast to the company's 13,400 employees.
It was a move so boldly 21st century that it made many (including us) like her a little bit more.
Now Bartz—a woman who once famously told TechCrunch's Michael Arrington to "fuck off" in front of a live audience—is speaking out on the incident, spouting off against her former employers in an article on Fortune.
Earmuffs, kids. Here are the best bits:
On first learning of her firing from Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock over a phone call:
"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?'"
And as Bostock finishes reading the statement?
When Bostock finished reading, Bartz didn't argue—"I got it. I got it," she told the Yahoo chairman. "I thought you were classier."
On her expectations as CEO:
"They want revenue growth," says Bartz about the Yahoo board, "even though they were told that we would not have revenue growth until 2012."
Note: During her 10 quarter reign, Yahoo's net income saw a 52% increase, according to The Atlantic.
...and how the board's indecision ended up hurting them:
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."
What she thinks about her replacement, former finance chief 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."
And, of course, regarding the board that fired her:
"These people fucked me over."
You can read the whole story at CNN Money. It may be sheer coincidence, but in the hours since the article was published, Yahoo's stock has fallen sharply.
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