Yesterday we published a news story on Scott Thompson, who left Yahoo as CEO. Further news on the story today indicate that Thompson did not step down, but was in fact fired from his position on Sunday. It has been revealed that he falsely claimed he earned a computer science degree.

Thompson was earning a salary of $1 million a year. and Yahoo will not be paying him severance pay for the 5 months he was in charge of the company. Yahoo employ 12,000 people. He will however receive cash and stock to compensate him for money he gave up when he left eBay. He was in charge of the Paypal division. Those award are said to be worth $6.5 million according to the Wall Street Journal.

Scott Thompson – ex CEO of Yahoo

Yahoo have declined to make any comment on Thompson and the public issues surrounding his departure.

Ross Levinsohn has taken over as CEO on an interim basis, but he is apparently interested in the job, full time. Yahoo are facing tough times ahead, with competition from Google and Facebook hitting their core business hard. They have recently made 2,000 people redundant.

Intel’s 22nm processors, better known as Ivy Bridge, are fresh out of the fab and have given the Santa Clara’s Core architecture a kick in the pants. But is the successor to Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge-E already old news? Not exactly, though a peek at Intel’s Research & Development roadmap reveals that a 14nm manufacturing process is already in development, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Slides of Intel’s R&D pipeline were posted to XBitLabs and show that 14nm is being developed from now through around 2014. Starting in 2015, Intel will look to 10nm, 7nm, and even 5nm, which are currently being researched.

“Our research and development is quite deep, I talk about ten years,” Intel CEO Paul Otellini told XbitLabs.

No kidding. Intel is currently upgrading fabs in Oregon, Arizona, and Israel for 22nm, and the chip maker plans to invest in its Oregon, Arizona, and Ireland plants for 14nm and beyond.

Scott Thompson, the Yahoo Chief Executive Officer who was being investigated by board members on allegations that he overtly padded his resume, has left the building and will not return. In his place is Ross Levinshohn, who Yahoo named interim CEO as it seeks a permanent replacement, or at least one that will last longer than Thompson did, which is barely more than four months.

An analyst with Evercore Partners said in a note that “Investors are likely to take comfort in fresh leadership, particularly at the board level,” pointing out that eight of the 11 board seats were filled in the past year alone. Along with Thompson’s departure, Yahoo board chairman Roy Bostock is stepping down, and indeed investors reacted positively to the news, pushing Yahoo’s stock price up 1.6 percent in pre-market trading, Reuters reports.

Investment firm Third Point, which has a 5.8 percent stake in Yahoo, was the driving force in all this, recently demanding that Yahoo look into Thompson’s hiring and make public the review process. With the resignation of Thompson and Levinsohn, Third Point as agreed to end its pending proxy contest and withdraw its previous board nominations, as well as vote its 70,545,4000 shares in support of Yahoo’s nominees.

“The board is pleased to announce these changes and the settlement with Third Point, and is confident that they will serve the best interests of our shareholders and further accelerate the substantial advances [Yahoo] has made operationally and organizationally since last August. The board believes in the strength of the company’s business and assets, and in the opportunities before us, and I am honored to work closely with my fellow directors and Ross to continue to drive Yahoo forward,” said Fred Amoroso, Yahoo’s board chairman.

Yahoo, which closed at $15.19 per share on Friday, was up to $15.52 in pre-market trading on Monday. The company has a market cap of $18.51 billion.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s youngest multi billionaires has turned 28 today. He is exactly half the age of the average S&P 500 CEO, according to reports from executive search firm Spencer Stuart.

Even though he is only 28 years old, he has been the leader for Facebook now for the last 8 years, which is a year longer than the ‘average’ CEO, according to the same report.

Facebook are expected to start selling stock to the public for the first time and then being trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Friday. The company could be valued at close to $100 billion, meaning it would already be worth more than Ford, Disney and Kraft Foods. Some of the largest companies in the world.

Zuckerberg has been hugely successful since forming the company in 2004. It was known as “Thefacebook.com” back then and helped college students connect connect with each other online. A new concept at the time. It has grown in the last 9 years to support 900 million people worldwide. It is the leading social networking site.

Mark Zuckerberg: a very wealthy young man

Zuckerberg may be young, but he has proven good under pressure and has refused takeover deals from the likes of Yahoo Inc and Google Inc. He wrote a letter to prospective shareholders saying “Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services, and we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.”

Scott Thompson resigned over the weekend as CEO of Yahoo Inc. He spoke to the board of directors and told them he had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. He discussed his situation last week before he resigned.

The decision for him to resign was partially due to his cancer diagnosis, according to a person familiar who spoke to The Wall Street Journal.

Scott Thompson: ex Yahoo

Thompson will be replaced by Ross Levinsohn, a senior Yahoo Executive who will become interim CEO. Thompson apparently told a few colleagues that he didn’t want to publicly discuss his cancer diagnosis wanting to keep the details private. He told a few people that he is beginning to get treatment now for the cancer.

Yahoo are also planning to appoint several new board members. The Wall Street Journal added “The cancer news is another twist in the recent events at Yahoo, which over the weekend also said it would appoint several new board members including Third Point head Dan Loeb. Third Point for months had been waging a proxy fight to win seats on Yahoo’s board. The hedge fund had spotted Mr. Thompson’s misstated academic record in a Yahoo regulatory filing in late April and disclosed its finding on May 3.

Pressure mounted on the board while it sought answers as to how the mistake was made, and why the error had also been contained in historical press articles about Mr. Thompson and on corporate websites that described his biography, most recently that of eBay Inc.’s PayPal.

While Mr. Thompson’s biography in the Yahoo regulatory filing and other websites said he had earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting and computer science, he only had earned an accounting degree.”