Here is what Carol Bartz thinks of the Yahoo (YHOO) board that fired her: "These people f—ed me over," she says, in her first interview since her dismissal from the CEO role late Tuesday. Last evening, barely 24 hours after Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock called Bartz on her cell phone to tell her the news, she called from her Silicon Valley home ("There are reporters at the gate… a lot of them.") to tell Fortune, exclusively, how the ax came down. On Tuesday, Bartz was in New York, to speak at Citigroup's (C) technology conference the next day, when she was supposed to call 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.
Steven Woda
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