May 19, 2014
In June 2011, Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock praised the company’s first female chief executive, Carol Bartz, at the annual shareholder meeting. She was making “hard-won progress” to turn around the ailing software company, he said. He and the board were “very supportive.”
Barely two months later, without warning or, to this day, explanation, Bostock fired Bartz in a telephone conversation that lasted less than three minutes.