After Yahoo stakeholders at activist hedge fund Third Point called out Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson for a padded resume last week, Thompson has taken to pleading ignorance in the matter. His latest defense claims he never actually submitted a resume for the gig or faked a degree. Actually, he has no idea how that extra Computer Science degree got on there.

According to the New York Times, executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles lead the search for Yahoo's top exec late last year. Thompson, meanwhile, reached out directly to Yahoo's board about the position and never sent in a list of his credentials. Either way, the nonexistent degree was listed on his corporate bio at PayPal well before he interviewed with Yahoo, so he'll still have to explain that one. For what it's worth, a slew of other regulatory filings for companies Thompson works with, or worked with in the past don't mention the made-up degree at all.

Still, the NYT is calling this a "firestorm" of a controversy. Which: No. This is not a firestorm. This is a guy who is seemingly qualified for his job getting grilled by an investor who wants to seat his pals on the Board of Directors of a company he has a sizable stake in. Not to mention, a lot of Silicon Valley types feeling like they're the center of the universe. But we digress...

Back in the land of Valley insiders, former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz took the opportunity to allow her famous potty mouth to weigh in on the matter, reportedly telling someone who actually cared to listen to her: "By the way, I DO have a Computer Science Degree." While that sentence would have been so much more satisfying with two to three more F-bombs in it, at least one Yahoo exec is feeling the spark of Bartz move within him, telling Business Insider, "We are so pissed off inside. I am a foot and a half out the door. I thought I'd never say this…I want Bartz back. At least she was a real CEO. This guy is so under-qualified."

Previously: Yahoo CEO Fudged His Resume, Calls Made Up Degree An "Error"
[Dealbook NYT]
[BusinessInsider]

Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson may not be quite the academic he professed to be. The excitedly-punctuated Sunnyvale company admitted today that, just four months into Thompson's tenure, their CEO's resume listed a degree in Computer Science that the executive never received during his time as an undergrad at Stonehill College.

At least one Yahoo investor, Daniel Loeb, whose hedge fund owns 5.8% of the company, is calling him out for the resume padding. Thompson, who graduated from the tiny Massachusetts school in 1979, does in fact hold an accounting degree from Stonehill; however, somewhere in the past five years, the fictitious CS degree started showing up on his resume. Curiously, no one at Yahoo caught the error when he was hired from his previous gig as president of PayPal. Now some leading tech gossips are calling for his resignation.

Loeb has accused Thompson of misleading Yahoo's board at a time when the web portal desperately needed someone to turn the ship around. Yahoo, on the other hand, is defending their new chief exec and calling the resume blunder an "inadvertent error," pointing out that Thompson still has the accounting chops to put Yahoo back on track.

During his first four months as Yahoo's chief, Thompson laid off about 2,000 employees — that unfortunate set of job losses lead to the company's first increase in year-over-year net revenues since 2008.

[BusinessInsider]
[TechCrunch]
[CBS5]

As SFist mentioned yesterday, Hewlett-Packard went ahead and hired former Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman as their new CEO. The HP board went ahead and fired Leo Apotheker after just 11 months on the job. Prior a disastrous bid for California--she wasted "a record breaking $43 per voter to lose the California gubernatorial election," notes Ryan Tate--Whitman was once the CEO at eBay. She also once famously (and allegedly) shoved one of her employees.

As AP muses, "The management shake-up represents yet another turnaround strategy at one of Silicon Valley's oldest, but most publicly dysfunctional, firms." And how.

Uh oh. According to AP, "Ken Lewis, the embattled CEO of Bank of America Corp., is leaving the company, succumbing to nearly a year of strife that followed his company's acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co." This comes on the heels of his shareholders castrating stripping Lewis of his title away earlier this year. Now based in Charlottle, North Carolina, BofA has a corporate office at 555 California.