Carly Fiorina is doing well in the Republican presidential primary debates running, in part, on her nearly six-year term as CEO of Hewlett-Packard that ended about a decade ago.
She was fired from HP in a "board room brawl," as she describes it.
At the time she was let go, many articles labeled her among the worst performing CEOs. HP's stock price was in tatters.
After Fiorina was fired, she went on 60 Minutes and accused board member Tom Perkins of masterminding her dismissal.
Fiorina is now fiercely recasting her time at HP as a success. So when The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler published an article called: "Carly Fiorina’s misleading claims about her business record," her team published a point-by-point rebuttal.
More recently, New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin published "Carly Fiorina’s Business Record: Not So Sterling."
And that prompted Fiorina's team to get Perkins to write her a glowing letter in response, e-mailed to many journalists including Business Insider.
Perkins, who cofounded famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, but who is no longer involved with the firm, called Fiorina "an excellent CEO," in the letter.
He explained her dismissal like this: "Critics often claim was fired at HP because she was unsuccessful. [sic] As a member of the board, I can tell you this is not true. In truth, it was the Board I was a part of that was ineffective and dysfunctional."
Note that Fiorina's new champion gained notoriety just last year when he wrote a letter to the editor to The Wall Street Journal in which he said people who criticized the rich were like Nazis who persecuted the Jews in the 1930s.
The comments caused an uproar, so Perkins went on Bloomberg Television and explained, clarified, apologized for using that analogy, then stood by the letter.
A few weeks later, he offered another interesting opinion: the richer you are, the more votes you should get to elect officials. "It should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes," he said during an interview at the Common Wealth Club.
By the way, someone did the math and discovered that such an idea would result in 1% of the population having 95% of the voting power.
