Legendary corporate raider Carl Icahn said he's "amazed" at Yahoo boss Jerry Yang's scorched-earth plans to fight off Microsoft and wants to oust the Web giant's C.E.O. from the corner office.

 
Yesterday, a Delaware state judge unsealed documents in a class action lawsuit against Yahoo, which outlined Yang's planned defense of his embattled company. Now Icahn has ratcheted up his rhetoric, telling the Wall Street Journal that if his proxy bid is successful, Yang is history.

"I'm very cynical about many of the boards and C.E.O.'s in this country, but even I am amazed at the lengths that Jerry Yang and the board went to to entrench themselves in this situation," Icahn told the paper.

Among other tactics, Yang was set to encourage all 14,000 Yahoo employees to quit if Microsoft succeeded, and he failed to notify them of Microsoft's $1.5 billion bonus package designed to encourage employees to stick around if the offer stuck.

In the wake of their release, Icahn unloaded on Yang.

"It's no longer a mystery to me why Microsoft's offer isn't around," Icahn said. "How can Yahoo keep saying they're willing to negotiate and sell the company on the one hand, while at the same time they're completely sabotaging the process without telling anyone."

Yang, as a member of Yahoo's board, would lose his seat if Icahn wins, but this is the first time the raider has said Yang will be out as chief executive, as well. Although it's hard to imagine that Icahn, if successful, would have allowed Yang to stick around, the financier's increasingly hostile rhetoric appears designed to turn up the pressure on Yahoo's embattled chief.

Adding to Icahn's anger may be the revelation, also contained in the unsealed documents, that Yahoo executives dismissed a search-advertising pact with Google on antitrust grounds just one day before Microsoft made its takeover bid.

"Short-term analysis of the revenue potential of outsourcing monetization [to Google] may not take into account the longer-term impact on the competitive market if search becomes an effective monopoly," an excerpt from a Yahoo document said.

In the weeks following Microsoft's bid, however, Yahoo held out a search-ad pact with Google as an alternative despite the company's earlier concerns, which it never made public.