Yahoo! CEO Tells Tech Blogger To "F- Off"

Have you ever heard of the technology blog called "Tech Crunch"?  It was founded by a guy named Michael Arrington, and it's popularity has made him highly influential in Silicon Valley and in the tech world beyond.  But his sometimes haughty demeanor and occasionally caustic commentary have earned him the enmity of an increasingly vocal minority as well. A great example of this is in the 1 minute clip HERE in which Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz tells him to "F**k off" during an on-stage interview at a conference yesterday, a comment that was then widely applauded by those in attendance and has been widely circulated today.


I went to law school with Mike over 15 years ago now and knew him well back then.  He was a good friend, especially during our first year when we lived down the hall from one another in the law school dorm.  A few years later, I also worked with Mike at a prestigious Silicon Valley law firm. I'm really impressed by how successful he's become and how he created it all from nothing after abruptly quitting our law firm at the height of the "Dot Com Boom" (in frustration and disgust, I assumed at the time).


That being said,  from almost the first day I met him as a young student in the fall of 1992, I noticed that he seemed to engender this type of unusually vitriolic reaction from a small minority of all the people he met. It was uncommon and unintentional, but nonetheless reliably recurrent. And usually in women, especially successful women. Fame does not seem to have changed him.