From The New York Times
Special Report: Tech Money Flows to Whitman, Bypasses Fiorina
SAN JOSE/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Valentine's Ball thrown by venture capitalist Alan Salzman and his wife Jillian Manus every year is one of Silicon Valley's hottest tickets. People are still talking about the Bailey's Irish Cream flowing from the nipples of ice sculptures at the soiree last year.
This year a "barrel full of monkeys" -- actually, live performers in monkey suits -- greeted guests to the couple's themed grounds in the swanky Northern California town of Atherton. The black tie and costume benefit for cancer draws CEOs, friends -- and up to $750,000 in donations.
Next year, Salzman said, his good friend and neighbor, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, will be invited, possibly attending as the newly elected governor of California.
And Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO with a shot at unseating California's three-term Senator Barbara Boxer on Tuesday?
"I don't think she'll be at our Valentine's party ... Let's say it that way," Salzman, who invests in electric sports car maker Tesla Motors and a swath of advanced solar companies, told Reuters....
Fiorina's reputation is front and center in her campaign. Her opponent, Senator Barbara Boxer, has hammered her for laying off or outsourcing 30,000 jobs, but Fiorina says she saved the company by doing so....
Morten Hansen, a professor at [the School of Information at] the University of California, Berkeley, ranked 2,000 CEOs for Harvard Business Review based on the their company's stock performance during their tenure.
Fiorina finished in the bottom 20 percent of the list, and Hansen questioned the idea that Fiorina had set the company on course to thrive after she left. "If that were true you would see an improvement earlier than you did," he said. "You should have seen better numbers at the end of her tenure but you don't."