Loeb.

Daniel S. Loeb, the Third Point LLC hedge fund manager whose fight for control of Yahoo paved the way for Marissa Mayer's appointment as CEO, is on the verge of gaining control of another seat on the company's board.

According to the New York Times, Yahoo plans to announce that former PayPal chief technology officer Max Levchin—a Loeb nominee—will join the company's board, in a move that may signal Yahoo's push to develop new offerings.

Mr. Loeb began his battle for control of Yahoo's board last September, when he disclosed a billion-dollar stake in the Internet company and launched a poison pen campaign, mocking Yahoo's "stupid logo" and "crappy interface." The fight came to a head in May when Mr. Loeb discovered that former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson had fudged his resume to include a computer science degree he'd never earned.

Mr. Thompson resigned, and the Yahoo board struck a deal with the hedge fund manager, giving Mr. Loeb control of three seats on the board. Soon after, the company hired Ms. Mayer to take the reins, a move widely seen to have breathed new life into the company.

Six months ago, Yahoo was a tech dinosaur, a moribund dot-com bypassed by the evolution of the social web and seemingly oblivious to mobile platforms. Kara Swisher had all but written the company’s epitaph when Yahoo made a headline-grabbing hire: Marissa Mayer, an early Google employee who had played a key role in such varied projects as the design of Google’s iconic landing page and the development of Google Maps and Gmail.

The new boss quickly garnered praise, first by staking a claim for the importance of mobile (even requiring employees to ditch their BlackBerrys for iPhones), and then for recruiting splashy new talent. The stock price rose, and media outlets followed with glowing profiles of the woman whose presence alone was enough to make Yahoo seem like a tech company again, rather than just a sliding stock symbol.

If shareholders were looking for someone to thank for bringing YHOO into 2012, they could have sent cigars to the offices of Daniel Loeb, the founder of hedge fund Third Point LLC, whose belief in Yahoo’s brighter future was the catalyst for hiring Ms. Mayer.

Last September, Mr. Loeb disclosed a billion-dollar stake in the company, then mocked its “crappy interface” and “stupid logo,” and said Yahoo “had one of the most horrendous management teams” he’d ever seen. That was just the start. Activist investors have long wielded poison pens in their attempts to influence companies, but Mr. Loeb—a tech-savvy investor who built his reputation shorting the tech bubble and who now operates a small VC fund as part of his portfolio—may be the first to launch a poison blog. (Our favorite post: a timeline graphic linking Yahoo’s falling share price to embarrassing moments in the company’s recent history. Botched Microsoft deal, anyone?) Then there was the scoop that turned tech journalists green with envy. After some internet sleuthing, Mr. Loeb revealed that then-CEO Scott Thompson had added a fictitious computer science degree to his résumé, and used the inaccuracy to force Mr. Thompson to step down.

When the dust settled, Mr. Loeb had won control of three seats on Yahoo’s board and helped land Ms. Mayer. He took after his star CEO and decreed that all Third Point employees would ditch their BlackBerrys for iPhones, then used his position on the Yahoo board to help settle a lawsuit with Facebook. In September, Yahoo sold part of its stake the Chinese internet company Alibaba, a deal that’s expected to net shareholders $3.65 billion in buybacks and dividends. “I am aligned with management and my fellow board members to drive shareholder value,” Mr. Loeb told The Observer. So modest.

Back to the beginning.

Thompson. (Source: Yodel Anecdotal/Yahoo! Inc. via Wikipedia)

Rebel Yahoo shareholder Daniel Loeb's campaign to upend the leadership at Silicon Valley's most troubled old-school Internet company has succeeded. In an exclusive, Kara Swisher reports for AllThingsD that Scott Thompson is gone. Mr. Thompson's fudged resume was a keystone in the crisis that began unfolding in Yahoo's upper echelons a week ago; it appears to have been his undoing. An investigation by Yahoo into the phony computer science credential Mr. Thompson listed in public biographies revealed that the now-outgoing C.E.O. also put the degree on his resume:

[Although] Thompson made a convoluted attempt to explain it all in two awkward employee meetings at the end of last week, in which he blamed a headhunting firm for introducing the mistake when he was being hired for a job at eBay in the mid-2000 timeframe.

That company, Heidrick and Struggles, slapped back with an internal memo noting that Thompson’s claim was not “verifiably not true.” Sources said that Heidrick told Yahoo’s board that it was in possession of a resume submitted by Thompson that he had apparently submitted showing the inaccurate CS degree on it.

Yahoo is probably doubly embarrassed at this point by the way it initially tried to shrug off its head man's nebulous credentials as an "inadvertent error."

AllThingsD reports Mr. Thompson will likely be replaced by  the company's head of global media, Ross Levinsohn.

Scott was also chief information officer of Barclays Global Investors, where he implemented a new strategic technology platform and global infrastructure. In addition, he has worked with Coopers and Lybrand, delivering information technology solutions to leading financial services clients such as Wells Fargo.

Scott received a bachelor’s degree in accounting and computer science from Stonehill College.

As the Associated Press reported today, Mr. Thompson does not actually have a computer science degree. The problem is Yahoo Inc. has reported the C.E.O. as having this credential in filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As the A.P. noted, Daniel Loeb contends this violates Yahoo's code of ethics.

In his letter sent to Yahoo's board on Thursday Mr. Loeb also wrote: "If misrepresentations were made, they would confirm yet again that Yahoo! is in dire need of a complete corporate governance overhaul. As we have asserted repeatedly and forcefully, as Yahoo!'s largest outside shareholder and a voice for our fellow investors, we believe the Yahoo! Board requires fresh, outside perspectives from individuals who have no connection to a failed regime and have the expertise to address the serious challenges facing the Company. "

Yahoo! termed the bit about Mr. Thompson's computer degree as a mistake, but Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson noted Mr. Thompson's "mistake" can be found in more than one online bio, including one used during Mr. Thompson's tenure as PayPal's Chief Technical Officer.  "C.T.O.!" writes Mr. Carlson, "How could that not be relevant that he did, or did not have a degree in computer science?"

Daniel Loeb's letter to Yahoo!'s board is actually a bit more scathing than either the A.P. or Business Insider indicated, as the contrast between Scott Thompson's claim of having a degree in computer science and the offerings available when he went to Stonehill College is rendered a bit more embarrassing by the following:

Furthermore, Stonehill College informed us that it did not begin awarding computer science degrees until 1983 — four years after Mr. Thompson graduated. We inquired whether Mr. Thompson had taken a large number of computer science courses, perhaps allowing him to justify to himself that he had "earned" such a degree. Instead, we learned that during Mr. Thompson's tenure at Stonehill only one such course was even offered – Intro to Computer Science. Presumably, Mr. Thompson took that course.

Ouch.