Carol Bartz says Yahoo board 'f---ed me over'

She tells Fortune that the company's directors had been spooked by claims of incompetence so "now they're trying to show that they're not the doofuses that they are." Bartz has exhibited a salty tongue ever since she came to Yahoo in 2009 (she had been told to knock it off, obviously to little effect). But claiming to have been fucked over by the board is quite a breach of the corporate-speak protocol that accompanies these high-profile departures. Actually, she has said "fuck you" quite a bit. From Fortune:

On Tuesday, Bartz was in New York, to speak at Citigroup's (C) technology conference the next day, when she was supposed to call [Yahoo chairman Roy 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.

[CUT]

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.

That evening, Bartz tapped out a short email, notifying the company's 14,000 employees that she had been fired - or, as she told the magazine, fucked over. It's interesting that she accuses Bostock of not being "classy" in how he let her go. By the way, Bartz's severance package is estimated to top $10 million, which is handsome but at this level not extraordinary.