He also won't answer her phone calls, she told the New York Post. "I don't want to be known for all this craziness in my life," said Courtenay. Nor, presumably, does Terry. A recap of her adventures:

• Had a public dalliance with Lindsay Lohan, the actress's first known same-sex relationship.
• Fought with ex Casey Johnson, who said Courtenay set fire to her hair, a claim she denies.
• Dated MySpace fameball Tila Tequila (they were last seen smooching in December).
• Told a security guard at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas to "just f—-ing Google me, you dumb f—-."

That off-brand moment in Vegas may have been the last straw for Terry. Now Courtenay's on her own — a conveniently dramatic plot point in the reality show she's working on!

Yahoos could hardly expect a generous gift in a year when the company went through two rounds of layoffs; failed acquisition talks with Microsoft amidst a neverending rumor mill; countless defections — including the departure of Qi Lu, Yahoo's top search scientist, to Microsoft; and a stock that dropped into the single digits. But nothing might have actually been better than the empty gesture of giving money to other people in lieu of a gift.

Getting nothing was the problem Yahoo's settlement winners had two years ago, when Yahoo's managers forced them to work unpaid overtime to launch a new online-advertising platform called Panama — the one that was so effective that Yahoo turned to Google for help selling ads earlier this year. The suit, Salsgiver v. Yahoo, has been settled and checks have been issued, with some plaintiffs getting $10,000 to $12,000, before tax, for their troubles. (One plaintiff tells Valleywag that 75 percent of the settlement came in the form of taxable salary, with the rest paid as a penalty.)

And what did Yahoo get for its troubles? A system that launched too late and rapidly proved outmoded. The reason why Yahoo ran up overtime for Panama was an abundance of caution; it spent a long period of time testing the new system, to make sure advertisers wouldn't encounter bugs. But the announcement that Panama would be late shocked Wall Street; by the time it rolled out in 2007, Yahoo's stock had already taken a hit, and continued to slide as CEO Terry Semel quit that summer.

He was replaced by founder Jerry Yang, whose 18-month reign has proved even more disastrous. The stock tumble prompted by Panama's delays opened the door for Microsoft's $44.6 billion takeover. Yang's clumsy negotiations with Microsoft dealt another blow to morale at an already unhappy company. Panama has been replaced by another platform, APT, which also shows no signs of beating Google.

The settlement of the Salsgiver lawsuit closes the door on the Panama debacle. But the $10 million the company is said to have shelled out is only a down payment on all the bills coming due from Yahoo's long eyars of mismanagement.

Yahoo turns 15 next month. The site first went live, on a Stanford Unversity server, in January 1994. The years since fall neatly into two halves: the first, its dizzying rise from a campus trailer to $100 billion goliath; the second, its equally stupefying fall. Here's a recap of the past decade and a half.

1994


Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo create Jerry's Guide to the Web, a directory of links to websites, in January. In April, they rename it Yahoo.

1995
Yahoo incorporates in March. Sequoia Capital, a VC firm which invested in Apple and Cisco, buys in. In August, it starts selling ads. The Web is now a business.

1996
Yang and Filo appear on the cover of Wired; Yahoo goes public, beating most of its Web rivals to the punch. But the early stock offering also means Yang and Filo are now subject to the whims of shareholders. Yahoo Japan, a partly-owned subsidiary, launches.

1999


Yahoo spends billions of dollars on GeoCities and Broadcast.com, acquisitions that later prove a waste — save for turning Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban into a billionaire, allowing him to buy the Dallas Mavericks and become an ongoing source of entertainment.

2000
Yahoo's market cap peaks in January above $100 billion. The stock begins a long slide after the dotcom bubble pops. In June, it signs a deal to have Google provide its search results. In retrospect, this is where everything started to go wrong.

2001
After a three-month search, Yahoo hires Terry Semel, the former head of the Warner Bros. studio, as CEO.

2002
Yahoo announces plans to buys Inktomi, a search engine.

2003
Semel follows the Inktomi buy with Overture, which sells search advertising, in a strategy to beat Google.

2004
Yahoo hires Lloyd Braun, a former ABC executive, to run its media operations. Hilarity ensues, as Braun proves laughably unsuited to the job and the online medium, and Yahoo's push into Hollywood-style content production proves a flop.

2005


Yahoo has secret talks to buy Flickr, the photo-sharing site. That deal happens. Microsoft has secret talks to buy Yahoo. Nothing happens. Yahoo reaches the peak of its post-bubble influence — but the surge proves illusory.

2006
Microsoft has secret talks to buy Yahoo. Nothing happens. Lloyd Braun "quits."

2007
Microsoft has secret talks to buy Yahoo. Nothing happens. Semel resigns. Yang replaces him.

2008
In a phone call in late January, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer bids $44.6 billion for the company — sort of. Semel quits the board that night. Yang and the board dither. In February, Yahoo lays off 1,000 employees. Microsoft eventually walks away. Corporate raider Carl Icahn buys shares, raises a stink, and gets three board seats. Yang steps down as CEO, pending a search for his replacement. In December, Yahoo lays off another 1,500 employees — 10 percent of its workforce. There's talk that Microsoft might be having secret talks to buy Yahoo. Nothing happens.

(Photo of Yang and Flickr's Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield by Ross Mayfield)

Apple, where cofounder Steve Jobs returned to power in 1998, is up 600 percent since the beginning of 2002. Amazon.com, where Jeff Bezos has reigned as CEO more or less uninterruptedly since the online retailer's founding, tripled its worth. Google, where cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin form a troika with hired-hand CEO Eric Schmidt, has also tripled in value since its inital public offering in 2004. These gains remain despite the stock market's punishing fall.

What about Yahoo, eBay, and Microsoft, where founders handed over the company to professional managers? They are all back where they started almost seven years ago. Under former CEO Terry Semel, Yahoo had a brief golden age in 2004, where it outperformed all the other big Internet companies; it ended just as Google began its relentless rise. Meg Whitman overstayed her welcome at eBay, presiding over its stagnation before handing over the CEO job to John Donahoe — like Whitman, also a management consultant by training. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has proven that he's no Bill Gates; the stock has flatlined under his leadership.

Under Yang, the stock has gone down, down, down, interrupted only by the hope that Microsoft might buy the company and in so doing, give its employees the leadership and sense of purpose they so desperately crave. Does that disprove the value of founders? No. Rather, it suggests that by abandoning his company when it was merely a toddler to be reared by strangers, that he was never much of a father figure to begin with.

There are, nevertheless, some possibilities.

One is former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who has been toying with entering politics. eBay and Yahoo have long flirted with a merger, so she's reasonably familiar with the company, and with the challenges of running a large Internet company.

A similar candidate: Jon Miller, the former CEO of AOL, who is now a partner at Velocity Interactive Group, a venture-capital firm. Money is tight in venture capital, and Velocity has yet to raise a promised new fund in the multiple hundreds of millions of dollars it had planned for when he joined it. Yet Miller has a problem: Time Warner, the parent of AOL, used his noncompete agreement to prevent him from joining Yahoo's board; it's not clear why they would waive it to let him become CEO. The agreement does not expire until next spring.

News Corp. COO Peter Chernin does not seem to have much hope of succeeding Rupert Murdoch as CEO, who is expected to hand the media conglomerate over to one of his children instead. But he does not have a credible claim for having much online experience — overseeing MySpace is the best he can do there.

And lastly, as a courtesy, Yahoo's president, Sue Decker, is under consideration. Some say Decker's Machiavellian maneuverings helped out former Hollywood studio boss Terry Semel as CEO last summer. But she's seen inside and outside the company as a bad manager who lacks a vision for what Yahoo should be.

More:

• 5 reasons why Jerry Yang is done at Yahoo
• Jerry Yang's goodbye letter to Yahoo
• Yahoos quietly cheer Yang's exit
• Newsweek reporter: Yahoo PR "lying sacks of s—-"

"At the time she was terrified her career would be over if she revealed her sexual tendencies," Courtenay told this "friend," who also says that "Courtenay still can't understand how Lindsay is now so open with [her current live-in girlfriend] Samantha [Ronson]," says the pal. "Every time she sees a picture of them together it kills her." Take heart, Courtenay. Daddy feels the same way about MySpace cuddling up with News Corp. At least you've got Tila Tequila. (Photos by AP and Getty)

Now, however, with Chris Albrecht well into his tenure as IMG boss — and with a $250 million mandate to develop content with talent including Tiger Woods and Gisele Bundchen— the pressure is on for Forstmann to do something a little more constructive than star-fuck his way around the roster.

Conveniently, Semel seems to need a project, and IMG is as good as any. Forstmann reportedly wants $3 billion, though — an "aggressive price" by most accounts; he picked IMG up for $750 million in 2004 and may fetch a little more than twice that if Semel can sort out a deal with Dubai International Capital, a government-owned holding company that also, last November, bought 3 percent of Sony for $1.5 billion. We're all for the deal, frankly — anything that gets Semel back on the scene (though his support for Israel might be a problem in a country to which Israelis can't even travel), particularly if it results in IMG client Elizabeth Hasselbeck trenchantly interviewing Gisele atop a man-made ski slope in some desert shopping megalith. Good luck, Terry!

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• Dubai International Capital and ex-Yahoo chief let fly at IMG [Times Online via PaidContent]

Yahoo's Santa Monica campus, which was built under Semel and Braun's tenure is now a News Corp. outpost, and while BermanBraun signed Web content deals last summer, I've yet to see as much as a press release from the pair since. Microsoft can be forgiven for biting on Michael Eisner's pitch hook, line and sinker, but struggling Yahoo should really know better. (Photo by Getty/Jean-Paul Aussenard)

Google, obviously, is one of the great success stories of all time, but Yahoo has done a great job with Terry Semel, who incidentally, they threw out of Time Warner.

• President Sue Decker, who has mostly instigated management upheaval to her Machiavellian advantage, is being paid in the "upper quartile" of comparable executives at Adobe, Apple, eBay, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Network Appliance, Oracle, and Time Warner.
• Raises handed out to Decker, CFO Blake Jorgensen, general counsel Michael Callahan, and top accountant Michael Murray:

  In connection with her promotion to the position of President, Ms. Decker's annual base salary was increased from $500,000 to $815,000, effective July 1, 2007. Mr. Jorgensen's annual base salary was set at $450,000 upon his joining the Company in June 2007. Mr. Callahan's annual base salary was increased effective April 1, 2007 from $325,000 to $360,000, and Mr. Murray's annual base salary was increased effective July 1, 2007 from $340,000 to $360,000. On March 3, 2008, the Compensation Committee increased the 2008 annual base salary levels of Messrs. Jorgensen, Callahan and Murray to $500,000, $420,000, and $375,000, respectively.

• Decker received 90 percent of her target bonus, or $1.1 million. Jorgensen received the same percentage for a bonus of $405,000, even though he hadn't worked at Yahoo a full year in 2007. (Jorgensen, though not previously CFO of a public company, did have this unique qualfication for his job: He was the best man at Decker's wedding. Decker is now divorcing.)
• Decker made a total of $14.8 million, including stock-based compensation, in 2007.

(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

That early IPO — a preemptive strike against long-forgotten competitors — was a blessing and a curse. It was great PR, but it also meant that Yahoo had to please shareholders from an early age.

In the '90s, it did so with aplomb. No one personified Yahoo's cockiness more than its president, Jeff Mallett. A former soccer player, Mallett was more often the public face of the company than its reticent CEO, Tim Koogle. He often was quoted when Yahoo struck a large advertising deal; he was an expert at squeezing cash and stock from startups desperate to get traffic from Yahoo. Mallett had his share of mistakes, like the $6 billion purchase of Broadcast.com from Mark Cuban in 1999. But he was, at the least, bold and decisive.

Terry Semel became CEO in 2001, pushing Mallett aside. A new management team came in, full of ad-sales specialists. From 2001 through 2005, Yahoo patiently courted Madison Avenue, building a formidable banner-ad business with blue-chip clients.

Semel also got Yahoo into the search business, buying Inktomi and Overture. But he failed to capitalize on their promise. Many insiders blame Sue Decker, then Yahoo's CFO, now its president, for milking those businesses for cash while Google was investing millions in its algorithms. Semel's other big acquisition push into user-generated content brought it properties like Flickr and Del.icio.us. But it stalled when prices started to rise in 2006. Semel balked at paying big prices for YouTube and Facebook, and they slipped from his grasp.

The rise of Sue Decker roughly parallels the decline of Yahoo. Decker is — no, was — an expert at catering to Wall Street, and a killer at board-room politics. Insiders believe she edged out Dan Rosensweig in a 2006 reorganization. She then, they say, lobbied the board to oust Semel as CEO, using Rosensweig's departure as part of the rationale. Cheeky, but clever.

Both moves backfired on Decker. She'd hoped to put Rosensweig in a lesser role, but he balked and left the company without anyone running its content businesses. Semel left, but Decker did not get the CEO job she'd hoped for. Instead, the company was left looking rudderless, with founder Jerry Yang stepping in as CEO.

Another Decker mistake: Her disgraceful treatment of Wenda Harris Millard, the company's beloved U.S. sales chief. When Millard told Decker she was leaving for Martha Stewart, Decker reacted furiously, locking Millard out of her office and issuing a press release that suggested Millard was out of touch and had been fired. Unsurprisingly, Yahoo's banner-ad sales have suffered since Millard's departures.

Which brings us, more or less, to the present. It's not surprising that Microsoft seized this moment to issue its $44.6 billion offer. Yahoo's poor earnings and gloomy forecast provided one opening; management's incompetent dithering over layoffs provided another.

It's possible that Yahoo might somehow escape Microsoft's grasp. But whatever course Yahoo takes from here, it's clear that it will be even further diminished. Yahoo will be best remembered in business schools, where it's taught as a case study: How quickly tech empires can fall.

A tipster sent us the oddly e.e. cummings-esque internal email from Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang announcing the departure:

several months ago, terry initiated discussions with the board of directors about stepping down from the chairman role once the board was able to identify a successor. since then, i have worked closely with terry and the board to ensure an orderly transition. today, we announced that terry will leave the board and roy bostock, who has been a member of the board since '03, will assume terry's role as non-executive chairman.

i want to thank terry for his years of service and contributions to yahoo!. he's been a great partner and a true friend. out of appreciation for everything he's done for us, we're naming the entrance to our sunnyvale headquarters "semel drive." stay tuned for more info.