Scott Thompson's tenure as Yahoo CEO lasted approximately four months. He departed in May 2012 after it emerged that his official biography — circulated to investors, employees, and the public — contained a fabrication: a claimed computer science degree that he had not, in fact, earned. The revelation, surfaced by activist investor Third Point and its founder Daniel Loeb, made his position untenable almost immediately.

Shortly before his departure, reports emerged that Thompson had also been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, a disclosure that complicated what was already a complicated exit and generated sympathy alongside the institutional crisis.

His departure accelerated a succession conversation that Yahoo's board had been unable to resolve for years. The company had by then cycled through multiple CEOs — Terry Semel, Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz, Thompson — each transition representing a company struggling to define what it actually was in a world where Google owned search, Facebook owned social, and Yahoo owned... a great deal of traffic, some valuable Asian assets, and considerable strategic uncertainty.

The key figures in the succession discussions included Ross Levinsohn, a digital media veteran who had been serving as interim CEO and who had advocates inside the company; and Marissa Mayer, then a high-profile Google executive, who would ultimately be selected as the permanent CEO in July 2012 — the announcement coming just hours after she revealed she was pregnant.

Mayer's appointment generated enormous attention, both because of her credentials and because of questions about whether Yahoo's core businesses were salvageable at all. The Asian assets — a significant stake in Alibaba, then still private — turned out to be worth far more than Yahoo itself. The full reckoning with that reality would take several more years.