Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and new Republican presidential candidate, appeared on NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers Tuesday to talk about her candidacy. Host Seth Meyers brought up the fact that Fiorina had failed to purchase the internet domain carlyfiorina.org before launching her campaign this week. Someone else purchased the domain instead, publishing on the site a short message about Fiorina’s layoffs at HP and representing all 30,000 of them with a frowning face emoticon.
“That’s kind of funny, actually,” Fiorina said when Meyers showed her an image of the site.
Fiorina continued. “Do you know who owns SethMeyers.org? I do,” she said. “I just bought it in the green room.”
“You’ve got that kind of scratch?” Meyers asked.
“Actually, it was really cheap, Seth. I hate to tell you,” Fiorina said. Watch the video below:
The campaign says the domain cost the businesswoman $16, and it appears Fiorina really has purchased it. SethMeyers.org redirects to her campaign website.
Fiorina was more serious when she addressed the issue of the layoffs during her time at HP, between 1999 and 2005, in an interview with Yahoo! News’s Katie Couric on Tuesday:
While she said the quote about the layoffs displayed on Carlyfiorina.org — “I wish I would have done them all faster” — was “clearly taken out of context,” Fiorina did say that “when I made the decision that an executive had to go, a lot of people came up to me and said, ‘I wish you’d done that sooner.’”
Watch that interview here.
Fiorina’s tenure at HP plays a large part in her political profile, but as carlyfiorina.org shows, plenty of people don’t see her time there as a success:
Critics—and there are legions of them, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street—say her six-year term at HP was a disaster. Falling stock prices and massive layoffs dominated her last years at the company. A controversial 2001 merger with Compaq, which was nearly killed by a shareholder uprising led by the son of cofounder Bill Hewlett, irreparably damaged her image within the company. After several quarters of disappointing stock performance, the board fired Fiorina. HP’s stock recovered considerably in the following years, though, while competitors like Dell and IBM struggled, suggesting Fiorina’s strategy may have paid off after all.
