Business

Bartz calls Yahoo board members “doofuses”

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz did not parse words in her first interview since being fired from the company Tuesday.

“These people f*cked me over,” Bartz told Fortune Magazine in an interview published on Fortune.com Thursday.

Bartz told the magazine she was fired while in New York Tuesday as she prepared to speak at Citigroup’s technology conference. Bartz said that she phoned Yahoo’s Chairman Roy Bostock Tuesday evening and that he began to read a lawyer’s prepared statement that stated her employment was being terminated.

“I said, ‘Roy, I think that’s a script,'” Bartz said. “‘Why don’t you have the balls to tell me yourself?'”

Bartz was hired as Yahoo’s CEO in Jan. 2009 and was able to slash costs and increase profit margins while she ran the tech-giant, but she said she felt she was fired because she was unable to grow revenue.

“They want revenue growth … even though they were told that we would not have revenue growth until 2012,” Bartz told Fortune, referring to Yahoo’s board.

Bartz said her fellow directors were impatient with revenue growth after they had second thoughts about turning down a lucrative offer to sell the company to Microsoft in 2007.

“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 said that she decided to reveal that she was fired rather than issuing a resignation statement. Yahoo’s 14,000 employees were the first to know of her firing when she sent out a company-wide email Tuesday night:

“I want to make sure that the employees don’t believe that I’ve abandoned them. I would never abandon them,” Bartz said. Besides, she added, “I have way too many purple clothes,” referring to Yahoo’s purple logo.

Bartz called Yahoo’s new interim CEO Tim Morse “a great guy,” but had a different recommendation for who should lead the company in the long-term.

“They should bring me in. I knew what to do,” she said.