So Yahoo did the thing again. Another CEO gone, this time after less than five months on the job, and the reason is almost too dumb to be real: Scott Thompson's official bio said he had a degree in computer science and accounting from Stonehill College. Turns out it's just accounting. He resigned Sunday, May 13th, and by Monday morning Ross Levinsohn was already installed as interim CEO, which if you've been paying attention is basically Yahoo's house band at this point.
I want to be clear about the timeline because it actually matters here. This wasn't some tabloid dig or an anonymous tip. Daniel Loeb, the hedge fund guy at Third Point who's been agitating for board seats, found the discrepancy sitting right there in Yahoo's own SEC filings and started waving it around publicly back on May 3rd. Yahoo's first response was to call it an "inadvertent error," which is a hell of a way to describe putting a degree you don't have on federal paperwork. Then it turned out this wasn't even the first time the fake credential had surfaced. The same padded bio had been floating around since at least 2007 when he was at PayPal. Ten years and nobody checked.
Here's my actual opinion on this, and I know it's not a popular one to say out loud: everyone fudges a resume a little. I've done it. You've done it. "Proficient in Excel" when you mostly just know how to make a pivot table and pray. But there's a real difference between rounding up and inventing an entire degree that doesn't exist, then putting that fiction in filings your own general counsel has to sign off on. That's not embellishment, that's just lying, and the fact that it took an activist investor's proxy fight for anyone at Yahoo to notice is somehow the more embarrassing part of this whole thing.
This is also Yahoo's fifth CEO change since 2007 if you're counting. Semel, then Yang stepping back in briefly, then Bartz who got fired over the phone in September 2011 (still one of the more brutal corporate exits I've read about), then Thompson, now Levinsohn holding the seat warm. Five CEOs in five years at a company that used to basically be the front page of the internet for people my age. My first email address was on Yahoo Mail, back in like 1998, that blue and purple interface, dial-up so slow that checking it felt like an actual event you'd plan around. It's strange watching a company go from that to this from the outside. This slow public unraveling where the product barely comes up anymore because the leadership drama eats all the oxygen.
One more detail that's bugging me. Thompson had also just disclosed a thyroid cancer diagnosis a few days before he resigned, and the board says that had nothing to do with the timing of his exit. Maybe that's true. But it makes the whole thing messier and sadder than a clean integrity scandal, and I don't love how those two stories got tangled together in the same week of coverage. One of them is a health issue that deserves some privacy. The other is a governance failure that deserves real scrutiny. Mashing them together in every headline makes it harder to talk about either one clearly.
What I keep coming back to, though, is how avoidable this was. A basic background check catches a fake degree in about ten minutes. Yahoo's board apparently either never ran one or ran one and didn't read it, for a guy they put in charge of a company that still has something like 700 million users a month. That's not really a hiring process. That's a coin flip with extra steps and a six-figure salary attached.
If you're a hiring manager reading this, for whatever it's worth: check the degree. It's free, it's fast, one phone call to a registrar's office and you're done. I don't know how this became the thing that finally embarrassed Yahoo enough to act, out of everything else going on over there lately, but here we are.