On Tuesday afternoon, Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz was notified that her services at the company were no longer necessary. The message was delivered over the phone and the fact that she wasn’t given the respect of a face to face meeting wasn’t the only thing that ticked Bartz off. “I was in New York to speak at Citigroup’s technology conference the next day and was told to call chairman Roy Bostock called Bartz. I called him at 6:06,” she told Fortune. “When he got on the line, he started reading a lawyer’s prepared statement to dismiss me. I said, ‘Roy, I think that’s a script. Why don’t you have the balls to tell me yourself? I thought you were classier.’” While it’s unclear why Bostock lacked the pair or the grace to go extempore, Bartz is pretty sure she knows why she was canned.
“These people fucked me over.” She adds, “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.”
Well consider your plot foiled, boys! If anyone thought Bartz was going to go quietly, or go period, they thought wrong. Girlfriend’s not going anywhere, this much she promises you. Continue reading »
As we’ve previously discussed, Danielle Chiesi herself as admitted she was able to get a leg up on other insider traders by making sure to have both legs up in the air while in the company of some highly placed tech executives. Having said that, she knew that with others, like the guys not interested in opening their ‘hearts‘ to women besides their wives, a different tactic was necessary to get them to spill.
“They’re gonna guide down,” Chiesi told Raj Rajaratnam, according to a wiretap of their conversation on July 24, 2008, six days before Akamai made its public announcement. “I just got a call from my guy. I was talking about the family and everything and then he said, people think it’s gonna go to 25.”
“Honey, you know what, it’s just for us,” Chiesi continued, according to the tape. “We go slow, keep shorting every day.” “I played him like a finely tuned piano,” she added.
It’s one thing to deploy one’s “sexuality to build sources at male-dominated tech companies” but it’s quite another to know when to switch gears and ask questions about how their kids are doing, all the while waiting, knowing what’s coming. That Chiesi had such skills was not the only thing that stuck out to Raj, however. He was equally if not more so impressed with the high moral character she demonstrated while obtaining material non-public information. Continue reading »
