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Yahoo's Marissa Mayer In Line For $55M Severance If Fired Within A Year Of Sale (nytimes.com)
whoever57 writes: A Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing on Friday revealed that Yahoo's board has agreed to a $55 million severance package for Marissa Mayer if she loses her job within a year of a sale. That's a lot of money for a chief executive who hasn't been able to keep Yahoo's stock from falling. In 2015, the value of Yahoo's stock fell by 33%. Worth noting: most of the money from the severance package is composed of restricted stock units and options -- there's only $3 million in cold hard cash. Also, Yahoo revealed Mayer received a significant pay cut last year. Her "reported pay" was $36 million, but her "realized pay" is closer to $14 million.
That's a lot of money, full stop. Nothing else needed to be said after that. Where can I get a job like that? I mean since the price of labor is going down and all... This is PROOF that ability and hard work has exactly jack shit to do with compensation or the Majick Fairytale Free Market.
C|N>K
About the same time getting 55 million dollars for tanking a company?
That would be adequate for all the damage she did. But CEOs these days cannot fail anymore, no matter how stupid and destructive. They just get a few ten millions less in compensation, but still get indecently rich.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Maybe golden parachutes should be based on performance (long-term, over the course of employment).
They shouldn't automatically get millions just for taking on a risky job.
This is one of those things that in one hundred years time people will look at with a similar kind of horror that most of us feel about the matter-of-fact slavery state of affairs in 19th century America. The system is ridiculous - those who decide the CEO's compensation package are, by and large, the members of the board. And who are the members of the board? By and large, CEOs of other companies. Shareholders have something to say, of course, but unless you own a sizeable chunk of a company, you might just as well ignore the whole thing. At any rate, if your chunk is big enough, you will have a seat on the board.
Behold the robber barons of the 21st century.
That shouldn't be too hard. It's not like CEO's really do anything.
Yahoo was in a death spiral before she came on board. She was hired to make changes to try to save the company. Then people were upset when she made changes. I don't see how letting people work from home was going to right a sinking ship. If they came to work and worked together they may have been able to do something. It was too late, and nothing she tried was able to save the company.
This. The guys sitting on the non-exec boards or renumeration boards are mostly from the same pool of people who are directors themselves in other companies. One hand washes the other... They're basically stealing from the shareholders, who mostly don't mind because the large institutional investors like pension funds are run by the same guys.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The Yahoo Board that rejected Microsoft's $43 billion takeover offer are the parties who committed breach of fiduciary duty. Everything that came after that has been a desperate attempt to stack sandbags in front of a tsunami.
sPh
Bingo! The biggest tell to this is asking the shareholders what they think of this deal. I mean, there are in fact the owners of the company, right?
This is an organizational problem where boardmembers can decide the fate of one of their own, and they are completely shielded from the actual owners.
There is a case to be made about the balance of power between the business and the shareholders, and the board is meant to balance the concerns of the two.
But as of late, it has translated into excessive CEO pay and golden parachutes, and until the SEC decides to grow a pair and start prosecuting for racketeering or investor throw up their hands in disgust and refuse to give money to these assholes, nothing is going to change.
Make her earn her pay cleaning toilets. Eliminate her personal daycare and require her to report 7am every day.
She'll quit the next day.
Q.E.D.
Used to be only failed male CEOs could run for governor or president.
Yahoo! had around $5bn in sales last year with a 56.65% gross profit margin - they made around $2bn in profits from their ad business alone. That's not exactly a failing company. They're small in comparison to the likes of Google, but a big part of their financial trouble is that they own 20% of Alibaba, which turned out to be a spectacularly good investment and they made more money from their investments than they did from operating the company. This makes investors nervous (if they wanted to own a stock whose value tracked the performance of Alibaba, they'd have bought Alibaba, not Yahoo!). The doom and gloom pronouncements have more to do with Wall Street than Silicon Valley.
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