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Marissa Mayer Will Make $186 Million on Yahoo's Sale To Verizon (cnbc.com)
Vindu Goel, reporting for the NYTimes: Yahoo shareholders will vote June 8 on whether to sell the company's internet businesses to Verizon Communications for $4.48 billion. A yes vote, which is widely expected, would end Marissa Mayer's largely unsuccessful five-year effort to restore the internet pioneer to greatness. But Ms. Mayer, the company's chief executive, will be well compensated for her failure. Her Yahoo stock, stock options and restricted stock units are worth a total of $186 million, based on Monday's stock price of $48.15, according to data filed on Monday in the documents sent to shareholders about the Verizon deal. That compensation, which will be fully vested at the time of the shareholder vote, does not include her salary and bonuses over the past five years, or the value of other stock that Ms. Mayer has already sold. All told, her time at Yahoo will have netted her well over $200 million, according to calculations based on company filings.
Did she really ruin it, though? She took command of the Titanic about 100 meters from the iceberg. Or possibly after it had already hit. Could anybody have done much better?
She certainly didn't screw up as badly as Stephen Elop or Carly Fiorina.
I think it's the idea though. The idea that any person walks away with that much money from a company that's purpose is ostensibly to provide services to people in different ways. Milking it for such a grotesque amount of personal gain, regardless of the outcome, is perverse and should never be rewarded. That's not the model that anyone who cares about society wants to support. On that front alone Mayer is a failure.
Firewall block for yahoo.com and all related assets. They categorically do not deserve our traffic.
The implication of this article is that Mayer made out like a bandit while doing a bad job. But the numbers say that she didn't do a bad job. That surprised me, because my perception was the opposite, but the last time this came up, I did the numbers here.
Under Mayer's tenure, Yahoo! generated a 21% annual growth rate in market value, beating Apple, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, as well as the NASDAQ, S&P 500 and Dow Jones. I should point out that those companies also pay dividends, but they're all in the 1-2% range, so the dividend payouts don't change the results.
Now, you can argue that some other CEO would have done better, or that the main reason for Yahoo!'s success under her tenure was the decision to invest in Alibaba, made by her predecessor, but speculation about what someone else might have done is unproductive, and she decided to stay with that investment. The bottom line is that CEOs are supposed to generate value for shareholders, and market-beating value was generated, from a company that was clearly moribund before she was hired.
You can also argue about whether any CEO is worth the millions they get, but if you judge against other CEOs she earned her money.