"The former PayPal president was hired in January to fill the void left from the sudden departure of Carol Bartz, who was famously fired by phone. At least on the bright side Thompson wasn’t extended the same courtesy. Only a few months in to his new appointment, he promised a “smaller, nimbler, more profitable” company, while at the same time serving pink slips to 2,000 employees. Thompson justified the move by claiming the company would save around $375 million per year. Yahoo’s first quarter under his leadership scraped a low bar, generating $1.077 billion in revenue minus traffic acquisition costs, managing only a 1 percent increase on the first quarter of 2011.
During the earnings call, he said the company would scrap 50 ‘non-core’ products from Yahoo’s portfolio, leaving only Yahoo News, Finance, Sports, Entertainment — and crucially, Yahoo Mail — in the clear. But friction emerged between Loeb and Thompson soon after his hiring. Dan Loeb, founder of Third Point, which has a 5.8 percent stake in Yahoo, wanted more seats on Yahoo’s board. Yahoo refused, and Loeb fired back with allegations that Thompson had not been awarded a computer science degree at Stonehill College as was claimed on his Yahoo biography. The erroneous biography was made only more suspicious after it was ported from eBay pages while he was at the company.
Despite the matter only being a minor detail to his record, he had ample opportunity to correct the mistakes — even when interviewed in person — but failed to do so. Yahoo pulled the biography from its website within hours of Loeb’s allegations, but it didn’t escape SEC filings, in which the biography was ported to the filing without a moment’s thought. Yahoo effectively misled the U.S. government in an official report."
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