Carol Bartz may not have known how to save the troubled internet group she once ran, but she certainly knew how to put the yahoo in Yahoo.
"These people fucked me over," Bartz told Fortune magazine in her first interview since she was fired by phone on Tuesday. The ousted Yahoo chief executive blasted the board in a foul-mouthed tirade.
"The board was so spooked by being cast as the worst board in the country. Now they're trying to show that they're not the doofuses that they are," she said.
Bartz told the magazine that Roy Bostock, Yahoo's chairman, called her and read her a lawyer's prepared statement to dismiss her. Bartz said: "I said, 'Roy, I think that's a script. Why don't you have the balls to tell me yourself?'"
Yahoo issued a statement on Tuesday saying that Bartz had been "removed" from her post and would be replaced by chief financial officer Timothy Morse on an interim basis.
Once the biggest name on the web, Yahoo remains a huge draw for advertisers and audience. But the company has fallen behind Google and Facebook, which are still growing while Yahoo appears to be fading.
Bartz slashed costs and cut staff but was unable to revive revenues. Yahoo has now appointed a panel to review the company's options.
The combative Bartz is no stranger to salty language. In a 2010 discussion with analysts, she expressed her dissatisfaction with the company's management structure thus: "We had a lot of people running around and telling people what to do, but nobody was fucking doing anything."
She promptly apologised for letting the phrase "slip out".
In an interview with Reuters in 2010, Bartz said her swearing was "honest" language that she used to make a point. If she were male, no one would pay much attention to it, she said.
Asking what she was planning to do next, Fortune's interviewer mentioned her age, 63.
"Fuck you – yeah," said Bartz, who said she remained on the board of Yahoo as an independent director.