
Dissecting Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo Compensation - mhb
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/technology/yahoo-marissa-mayer-compensation.html
======
kyleschiller
There are a lot of good points here, but it feels like most of her
compensation is explained right here

    
    
      To lure Ms. Mayer from Google and compensate her for options she forfeited there, Yahoo’s board offered her a lucrative employment agreement. She initially received restricted stock worth $35 million and stock options worth $21 million, based on 2012 stock prices for Yahoo, along with a cash salary and bonus.
    

It sounds like Mayer was initially making way more than the 900k/week figure
quoted in the title, so it almost doesn't make sense to talk about her
performance the rest of the time if we're interested in explaining here
salary. There were a couple of significant missteps that the article explains
resulted in meaningful pay cuts, but it sounds like the bulk of her
compensation was determined from the beginning.

~~~
ebbv
That doesn't mean it's not worth discussing. I could get hired to be the CEO
of Ford and get a contract for a ton of money. But I'd do a poor job probably.
It would be worth discussing afterward; how did this happen? Why are executive
salaries so incredibly disproportionate to their impact and benefit to the
company? What can be done? What should be done?

~~~
edanm
It isn't clear that the salaries are in fact disproportionate. The article
makes the case that there were many mistakes, but that it's hard to say if
anyone else could've done better. And the shareholders did end up making a lot
of money.

I'm not sure anything should be done here. The shareholders chose to pay a lot
to get her as CEO. Even if they lost out, it's not a reason to intervene.
People make bad bets all the time.

~~~
pooper
Something must be done to rein in executive pay though. I am not talking about
MM in particular. She is probably a fine executive. However, my point is that
unchecked executive pay is not good for anyone. We don't live in a free
market. There ought to be some way to cap pay.

A progressive income tax that caps out at 90% of income above $3M a year? So
if you make $3,000,001, you pay 90 cents in taxes on the last dollar you
earned sounds fair to me.

~~~
edanm
"However, my point is that unchecked executive pay is not good for anyone. We
don't live in a free market. There ought to be some way to cap pay."

Why? To all those questions.

I mean, in some specific cases you might be right, but in the case of
shareholders, who own a company, deciding how much to pay to the executive
that they choose to run that company, why would someone else need to be
involved in that decision? Who is supposedly losing out here? The shareholders
themselves?

They (vicariously) own the money in the company, and choose how much of it to
pay to the executive, because they believe that's the best way to make more
money in the long run. Why do you think you know better than them, when
they're actually betting money on it?

Or is someone else being hurt here?

Also, as far as I understand it, you're mixing two different things by
proposing to "fix" this with an income tax. You said in the paragraph above
that executive pay is not good for anyone, which I presumed to be about (or at
least to include) the shareholders of the company. But by introducing taxing,
you are quite literally talking about taking money from the shareholders and
giving it to the government. So at least in this way of doing it, you're quite
literally not protecting the shareholders but rather "harming" them. (This
doesn't make income taxes bad or anything, I'm just pointing out that one
thing they're _not_ good for is to protect shareholdres, IMO).

~~~
ebbv
The idea that shareholders own the company and are therefore good, objective
arbiters of CEO pay sounds good on paper but even the simplest of examinations
of how this functions in reality should tell you what the problems are.

First, the board who decides the CEO pay are not objective. They are friends
with the CEO. They are not objective. The social circles of boards of large
companies and the CEOs they hire is not that big, and they do not think
objectively about each other.

Second, there's no real motive for them to be strict with the CEO; there's
every motive to be overly generous. If they give the CEO ultra generous pay
and bonuses, they then expect (and receive) to be treated in the same way when
the shoe is on the other foot. When the CEO is on a board for a company they
are an executive at.

Executve pay has been on an insane runaway explosion for years. You can say
"That's because the companies are so successful!" But Yahoo is evidence
success has nothing to do with it.

And I would argue even if it were due to success; the workers should be
benefit at least as much as executives, and they don't.

~~~
edanm
"First, the board who decides the CEO pay are not objective. They are friends
with the CEO. They are not objective."

Well you might be right, but aren't hostile takeovers, activist shareholders,
etc. disproof of that? In fact, the article mentions that it was activist
investors who had Marissa Mayer instated, though I don't really know the
history of Yahoo that well.

"Executve pay has been on an insane runaway explosion for years. You can say
"That's because the companies are so successful!" But Yahoo is evidence
success has nothing to do with it."

It's pretty weak evidence, considering that Yahoo was very succesful for its
shareholders. I mean it's one thing to make the argument when the company
fails, which I still don't buy. But to make the argument when a company
succeeds, by claiming it didn't succeed enough, or that the CEO wasn't enough
responsible for the success?! (Defining success as what shareholders care
about in this case, which is making money). We can see examples of CEOs who do
much worse and destroy lots of value. And I'm not even talking about the fact
that they had to pay Marissa Mayer enough to take the risk, or that you can't
judge investments solely on whether they succeed or not, since all investments
are risks.

But I'm still left with one thing I simply don't understand here - who are you
trying to protect that is getting hurt? The shareholders? How are you
protecting them by limiting the ways in which they can use their money? If you
really think that shareholders aren't well represented and therefore make bad
decisions, then maybe you're right, but wouldn't the solution be to fix _that_
problem, instead of attacking a symptom?

"And I would argue even if it were due to success; the workers should be
benefit at least as much as executives, and they don't."

Not sure what you mean by "at least as much", but workers _do_ benefit. They
tend to hold shares of the company, which have increased in value just as much
as the CEO's shares. Salaries in e.g. tech companies are much higher, which is
another way in which workers benefit.

~~~
ebbv
Workers in general do not hold shares of companies. It is a small minority of
workers in the US who have shares of their company.

The workers are who I'm concerned about, not the board members. The workers
suffer from the current trend of executives and boards looking out only for
themselves and their fellow large shareholders.

Even when workers do have some shares of their company; I'm sure most Yahoo
employees who were laid off would rather still have their jobs than get a
final small dividend when Yahoo was sold off.

~~~
edanm
"Workers in general do not hold shares of companies. It is a small minority of
workers in the US who have shares of their company."

Fair enough, I was talking more about tech than about other industries, with
which I'm less familiar. Still, a companies success, as you allude to later,
is important for employees to keep their jobs.

"The workers suffer from the current trend of executives and boards looking
out only for themselves and their fellow large shareholders."

In what way? And why do you specify "large" shareholders?

"I'm sure most Yahoo employees who were laid off would rather still have their
jobs than get a final small dividend when Yahoo was sold off."

But you're changing the point of the debate! This option _wasn 't on the
table_. Yahoo was failing one way or another. The whole articles' point was
that Marissa Mayer tried what she could to turn Yahoo around, but ended up not
entirely succeeding on that front. That said, Yahoo overall was a good stock
to buy because of other investments.

As other people in the article and in the thread tend to agree with, it's not
clear if someone else could've done better. The big question that people have
talked about in this thread is whether Marissa Mayer should've received so
much money for a growth in Yahoo that purportedly happened without her having
anything to do with it.

Btw, I'm just as sure that the shareholders of Yahoo would've been as happy as
the employees for Marissa Mayer to have succeeded and breathed new life into
Yahoo. Why wouldn't they? Trying to cast this as shareholders vs. employees
strikes me as completely wrong.

~~~
pooper
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I don't want to make this about about MM v
Yahoo!. MM is at worst a symptom. My argument is that the disease is systemic.

> In what way? And why do you specify "large" shareholders?

I don't want to go too far into conspiracy theories but I think it is logical
that under certain circumstances, a "large" individual shareholder may not
have the best interest of ALL the shareholders in mind. Of course, I don't
think what I propose will ever exactly happen. This is merely a thought
experiment to guide us.

A guiding principle I remember learning in elementary school was that our
rights are not absolute. Our right to freedom of speech is not absolute and
neither is the right to bear arms. These rights, even though enshrined in our
constitution, are arbitrary lines drawn in sand.

I think the right of a corporation to pay and the right of an individual to
make a living are also such rights. Now, I don't expect anyone to pick this
idea up. It is too toxic. The idea that we should put caps on how much an
individual is allowed to earn is unthinkable for most people. People are
talking about repealing the estate tax permanently which is a huge blow to my
idea.

I hope some day we can push for an aggressive progressive income tax and
estate tax. There are a lot of things that need to fall in place for it to
happen though. For instance, it should become impossible to transfer large
sums of wealth without it showing up on a public ledger of some sort. If
someone has not earned $3M+ sum total (including inheritance) over their life
and they buy something that costs $3M, that should automatically trip some
alarm about back taxes.

The more I think about it the more absurd it begins to sound though. Maybe I
was wrong to suggest progressive taxes as a way to enforce caps. If not taxes,
what are some ways we can try to rein (is this the proper spelling?) in
executive pay?

------
perryh2
Something that is often left out from these articles is the $230 million
acquisition of Polyvore in 2015 [0]. I still don't know the reasoning behind
this decision other than the existence of prior relationships with people that
worked at Polyvore. From casually browsing the Yahoo Style vertical, I don't
see any connection to Polyvore's site and vice-versa.

[0] [http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-jackson-slams-yahoo-
for-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-jackson-slams-yahoo-for-polyvore-
acquisition-2015-12)

------
yourapostasy
IMHO the activist shareholders were the key decision makers in this story. The
key I believe was the following.

"The surging value of those investments [Alibaba and Yahoo Japan] — not any
brilliant business moves by Ms. Mayer — is why Yahoo’s shares went
up....managing those investments was a key reason that Yahoo’s board hired Ms.
Mayer...Ms. Mayer delegated the Alibaba issue, hiring an experienced
dealmaker, Jacqueline Reses, to be the company’s principal liaison to Alibaba
and its leaders, Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai. Ms. Reses helped the Chinese company
navigate its initial public offering. She also renegotiated an agreement,
struck just before Ms. Mayer arrived, that would have forced Yahoo to sell an
additional 122 million shares in the offering. Those extra shares are now
worth $15 billion."

Those two acts---knowing how to find Reses, and knowing how to delegate to
Reses---combined with finding a buyer, were what made Mayer's compensation
palatable to those activist shareholders. Those shareholders considered Mayer
an enablement platform like a smartphone app store, and for the value
"unlocked" enabling the shareholders to cash out, they were willing to pay the
enablement fee. For a fee far lower than 30% of what they unlocked, they
probably considered it well worth paying.

That unlocking the value meant effectively dismantling Yahoo was incidental
for the decision makers.

I think the moral of the story for me personally is if I ever find myself
within a company where activist shareholders successfully get on the BOD to
"increase shareholder value" in any manner that smells of selling off all or
the most profitable/highly-valued parts of the company, then I will send out
my resume (always maintained and updated) and update my availability status.

I'd like to hear contrary viewpoints, though.

------
smoyer
"Arguably, Yahoo was unfixable. The company’s DNA and technology were built
around its original identity as a web portal"

I have a theory that there's always at least one big web portal - AOL started
as a dial-up ISP and turned into a portal. Yahoo started as a search engine
and turned into a portal. Facebook started as a social network and turned into
a portal.

~~~
mattmanser
As far as I remember, Yahoo was a portal first and foremost, it didn't start
with a search engine. The quick googling I just did seems to confirm that, it
started as a human curated directory and didn't start crawling till 2002 (and
almost bought Google at that point).

~~~
mcherm
It makes me feel old when people talk about doing historical research on
events that I lived through.

When yahoo first started out (and at that time I was using it) the role it
played was equivalent to that which search engines play today. At that point
in time there were no search engines, the only way to know about a website was
to already have the address, or two read someplace that referenced or linked
to it. Yahoo was initially "just a list of websites" but the role it played
was very much the role that Google plays for so many people today: the site
you start out on, and the place you go if you want to find something on the
Internet.

They eventually lost that role to search engines like Alta Vista, and later
incarnations of Yahoo became a"Portal": a site you go to because it has decent
implementations of many different features such as news, movie listings, stock
quotes, and everything else that Yahoo offers.

~~~
mgkimsal
"Yahoo was initially "just a list of websites" but the role it played was very
much the role that Google plays for so many people today"

More specifically - you went there and could "search" the directory. You put
in a word or phrase and it searched the directory listings to find matches. It
was just only searching its own very limited set of info, vs a crawled index
of all the content of the sites. IIRC, they'd also started charging ($250
IIRC?) for adding a listing to their directory sometime in the late 90s or so.

~~~
jaredsohn
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory)
says $299 per year; also this page says that it just went away in 2014.

------
revelation
What is going on here? She was given a salary that made her preposterously
rich no matter what she does, an unlimited checkbook to buy and do whatever
she feels right, control over a huge enterprise with plenty of talent and
capabilities in place.. and the best of all, two magic money making boxes that
take no effort whatsoever but basically guarantee there is zero short term
pressure from shareholders.

And here we are joining a mad apologist chorus of "oh, but nobody could have
done differently". That is crazy. If you believe that, you might as well stay
in bed for the next month because apparently whatever happens has been
predetermined a long long time ago.

~~~
gcb0
Thank you!

------
abalashov
I think one thing that's important to keep in mind is that some part of that
compensation is for effectively jettisoning her career.

Proportional/justifiable? I don't know. But now she's the woman that drove
Yahoo! into the ground - that'll forever be her "thing", regardless of what
role she played vs. unavoidable reality of sinking ship. That can have the
effect of depressing compensation elsewhere, even if it certainly doesn't stop
her getting another executive role (as we all know).

If you're going to pay someone to be the captain of a cruise liner that has an
80% chance of sinking on its next voyage (even if it's not like the Titanic
where everyone dies), that's going to take some money, too. He won't be
piloting cruise ships for a while.

~~~
gaius
_compensation is for effectively jettisoning her career_

It doesn't work like that. Take Carly Fiorina for example. Measured either by
jobs or by shareholder value destroyed, she has a fair shot at the title of
"worst CEO in history, ever". And yet people still thought that that
experience qualified her for a shot at the Presidency. Indeed she even claimed
that her business experience was what made her the best candidate! MM will
probably be Uber's next CEO without missing a beat.

~~~
abalashov
Yeah, I know, and I was mindful of that in trotting out the hypothesis. But I
suspect there is a taxonomy within the upper strata of the CxO world where the
optics of "running Yahoo into the ground" may disqualify her from the crème de
la crème CEO jobs or pay packages, forcing her to settle for merely
$ungodly_sum with not so hefty a multiplier.

They're also rules that most likely apply only when making lateral moves
within the field, subject to the highly idiosyncratic rules of the Fortune 100
exec recruitment game. The headers get stripped when you move into something
like the Presidency, since there is an alchemy by which you can parlay a
previous stint as a Fortune 100 executive into the vague catch-all digest of
"business experience". I mean, look at our current President.

------
gaius
_" Yet most of Ms. Mayer’s paycheck ultimately came from the gains in Yahoo’s
Alibaba and Yahoo Japan investments, over which she had little control. Thanks
to an investment made in 2005, Yahoo had a 24 percent stake in Alibaba, which
today is China’s leading e-commerce company."_

Quite literally money for nothing, and people wonder why CEO pay is such an
issue.

~~~
JabavuAdams
Ah, but look at her pedigree and previous accomplishments! Like some kind of
orbit-injection-burn. She had to be at just the right place, at just the right
time, with the correct velocity.

Some days I'm jealous of these execs. Other times I realize that I was playing
computer games or reading esoteric subjects instead of excelling at jumping
through every hoop placed in front of me.

------
mks40
From reading this (and following this vaguely), I took the following
assertions:

i) MM had virtually nothing to do with tripling of stock value, that was due
to ownership in Alibaba/Yahoo Japan

ii) She did not turn Yahoo around as a business and made failed acquisitions.

Yet, the article wants me to believe

iii) Nobody could have done any better in this position. She achieved the best
possible outcome

If her net contribution to Yahoo as a business was 0, it seems pretty
unreasonable to assert that NOBODY could have made any better acquisitions
(e.g. buy Instagram, not tumble), or strategic initiatives (why focus on
search?).

~~~
danieltillett
I actually agree with the article that nobody could have done better, but they
certainly could have done the same as MM for a whole lot less salary.

~~~
curiousgal
You didn't address OP's point:

> _If her net contribution to Yahoo as a business was 0, it seems pretty
> unreasonably to assert that NOBODY could have made any better acquisitions
> (e.g. buy Instagram, not tumbler), or strategic initiatives (why focus on
> search?)._

~~~
pooper
I can't answer for anyone else but I can say with pretty good confidence that
Yahoo! would not exist today if they put me in charge. I would fling poop left
and right the moment I discovered the back door. I wouldn't have gave two
poops about shareholder value. I am sure "they" would have found something
sketchy about my past life that is worthy of at least ten life sentences and I
would be sent away for good.

I was already a little skeptical by the time Y! bought tumblr but I think the
effort was there. I saw bringing in Katie Couric and David Pogue as a way to
ease older people to watching "live TV" on Y!. I still don't think there was
any fault with the vision. It might just be that the execution was a few years
too early or bit too ambitious? I mean getting younger audiences to watch the
news is not easy and getting majority of the "old" people to go from lean back
to lean forward isn't easy either. It feels like a gamble and I still believe
it succeeded in a parallel universe.

~~~
rhaps0dy
>I would fling poop left and right

Username checks out :)

------
kome
"Arguably, Yahoo was unfixable."

I really don't think so. Their product would have succeeded with a more humble
and focused approach.

A generalist company like IAC/InterActiveCorp is doing fine: Yahoo too had all
the assets to keep a position of relevance on the global internet.

Yahoo management was bad. That's all.

~~~
tomhoward
IAC's market cap is about $8B. Yahoo's cap is 6x that at $48B.

It's hard to imagine Yahoo just transforming itself into the same kind of
company as IAC, only 6 times bigger. But it could be said that it is making
that kind of transformation, only more suited to its circumstances, by selling
off its consumer brands to Verizon and retaining just the more valuable Asian
investments in its current entity.

The whole problem for Mayer was that its key products had started losing
relevance long before she joined, and its brand/reputation was already a joke
among the types of people it needed to appeal to - i.e. early adopter
consumers and top engineering/design talent - if it was going to make a
turnaround.

Unlike Apple in 1996, it didn't still have loyal, true-believer devotees ready
to enthusiastically embrace it once it started producing good products again.
The people still using Yahoo products have mostly been people too indifferent
about tech to switch their email platform or their browser's default page -
i.e., people at the opposite end of the spectrum to Apple's true believers.

So all she could do was carve up the assets and distribute them in a way that
is most lucrative, which is precisely what she's done.

~~~
mgkimsal
> all she could do was carve up the assets and distribute them in a way that
> is most lucrative

That doesn't explain the dozens of acquisitions under her leadership.

~~~
tomhoward
Sure it does: it may have been the only way to attract and retain enough top
engineering and design talent to keep the consumer brands valuable enough to
sell at a good price.

Xobni, in particular, would fit that justification, given how key email has
been to Yahoo's user retention.

Tumblr on the other hand was more of a product/brand/audience acquisition than
an acquihire, but it could well have made the suite of consumer brands more
attractive to buyers.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
So she got paid preposterous amounts of money to ruin other businesses so she
could use their workforce to fool investors in to propping up Yahoo when it
was noticed Yahoo was no longer useful and was falling in it's goals?

Capitalism: 'optimising' markets by giving all the value created to
individuals who destroy the means of value creation.

It's like some sort of economic terrorism, destroy any hope of economy and
flee with the money.

~~~
marcosdumay
Now that you've named it, this looks way too common.

------
kostyk
After five years of leadership the bottom line is value of investment to
shareholders has tripled. Mission accomplished. Who cared about Yahoo web
business even then anyway.

~~~
jpatokal
The article's point is that virtually all of this tripling was due to Alibaba
and Yahoo Japan, not anything she did.

~~~
kyleschiller
I don't know, it mentions that she had "little control" over the investments,
but then goes on to explain that:

    
    
       managing those investments was a key reason that Yahoo’s board hired Ms. Mayer. Mr. Loeb had accused Yahoo’s previous leaders of mishandling both their core business and the Alibaba relationship.... Ms. Mayer delegated the Alibaba issue, hiring an experienced dealmaker, Jacqueline Reses, to be the company’s principal liaison to Alibaba and its leaders, Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai. Ms. Reses helped the Chinese company navigate its initial public offering. She also renegotiated an agreement, struck just before Ms. Mayer arrived, that would have forced Yahoo to sell an additional 122 million shares in the offering. Those extra shares are now worth $15 billion.

------
valuearb
Any article that claims to be "dissecting" her compensation and then doesn't
detail her prices for her option grants and how much she made from each
specifically and how much she made from her restricted stock, isn't
"dissecting" squat.

In reality she got options for a bunch of shares. The stock tripled, making
her hundreds of millions of dollars. If the stock had gone down or just not
gone up, she would have made far far less (basically just salary plus value of
the restricted stock grant).

Whether she deserves credit for that, or whether option grants are even a good
mechanism for rewarding CEOs, is an entirely different conversation (answers
are she deserves some credit and no). But she was never paid $900K a week. As
of today she can make $900K a week if she sold all her shares right now. But
until she cashes out her shares that amount changes daily. Next week her
estimated earnings could easily be down to $700K a week, a year from now they
could be nearly wiped out.

"Dissecting" option grant valuations in detail would also have been
interesting. For example her original option grant was valued at $21M. That
means that based over the length of the grant, with a reasonable expected
stock price increase (say 8% per year), compensation consultants estimated
that she'd profit $21M. So how many shares, at what price, add up to that
valuation? Why was that reasonable?

I understand she walked away from a huge amount of compensation she was owed
at Google to take the Yahoo job, and the board had to compensate her for that.
But how much of that was reasonable? "Dissection" of it by a journalist should
include details of that compensation, how the amount was determined, and
quotes from those who had opposing viewpoints at the time.

------
pmlnr
900k/week? That is 46M$ for a year. That is 500 times more than a salary
considered pretty decent in the UK tech world.

No matter who you are, what you do, that is just plain too much money to
receive as a paycheck.

~~~
na85
That's not even the highest, either. Pichai makes more than double.

~~~
pmlnr
Out of curiosity, what is the known highest salary for a tech-type employee?
(dev, sysadmin sre, whatever) You know, those whom without tech companies tend
to sink.

~~~
jacquesm
~350K / year afaihdp.

Consultants can and do make (much) more on a weekly or monthly basis but they
rarely have their dance cards fully booked, so then you have to discount the
weekly rate by how much down time there is.

~~~
icebraining
What about Anthony Levandowski? He worked for Google for about 10 years, and
got $120M.

How many tech people are getting hefty "incentive payments" which we don't
even know about, since they don't end up getting sued?

~~~
jacquesm
Those are the exceptions, not the rule.

~~~
icebraining
There's only one CEO per company.

~~~
nojvek
If you read carefully she got a lot of compensation as stock. It's the stock
price that shot up due to alibaba and yahoo Japan that netted her money.
Initial compensation was only 30 mil or so.

Same with picchai. Google is doing very well under him. Stock rises and his
gains rises. He is very incentivized to make that happen as the CEO

------
throw2016
I don't think focusing on Mayer is helpful. It is one of the more egregious
cases but it shows just how badly c-level compensation, accountability and
agency is broken.

It also shows how some economic theories that sound good don't remotely work
in the real world. And sometimes economic theories are designed to sound good.

There are real world consequences of skyrocketing executive pay disconnected
from performance and accountability. Bad or short term strategies can result
in losses of thousands of qualified and experienced people, plummeting
productivity and revenue, mid and long term setbacks and serious harm to
future prospects. Golden parachutes usually mean no consequence to the
implementing c-level teams. They usually end up easily soft landing at a
consultancy or another gig.

Carly Fiorina and Stephen Elop come to mind. Robert Nardelli and Home Depot
also come to mind. You can't be hand waving around this for 2 decades
counting.

------
turbinerneiter
They could have payed roughly 500 people for 5 years with that money. Maybe
one of them would have caught the bugs that led to their data breaches.

They also could have bankrolled 10 or more start-ups with that cash.

Hell, they could have spent it on blow for their workforce. At least that
would have made for interesting stories.

~~~
exodust
I know right, I can't understand how we _still_ place so much importance on
the character sitting in the CEO's chair and not the people actually working
on the products.

I suppose not all companies do that. It's sad about Yahoo, my first email
address was Yahoo, signed up around 1998. I still have it and use it.

------
k__
Sounds like she and her friends she hired were some kind of locust who got
lucky in the end.

~~~
na85
Sounds more like she joined a sinking ship and it sank.

~~~
k__
They sold it for a fortune before it sank.

~~~
na85
I guess so. I'd expect no different from any other CEO.

------
james1071
Normal rules don't seem to apply in Silicon Valley.

------
2_listerine_pls
Yahoo is dying, let's put Marissa at Yahoo to avoid being seen as a monopoly.

------
timwaagh
why does it need to be even a question whether she was overpaid. these ceos
always are. in this case even more, because they paid for a big name. names
dont produce results, but they cost a lot of money all the same.

------
ensiferum
I know this is going to sound bitter but I could have trained a monkey to do
her job. And I would have asked for only 50% of her salary.

I'm sure she thinks she did a great job and earned her position etc. By
realistically I think her best assets are like any other professional CEO' s.
Good at bullshitting and at golf and knowing the right ppl.

What really frustrates me is how nothing ever sticks to these guys. Lose or
fail it's never their fault and they always earn their money's and bonuses.

~~~
babyrainbow
>I know this is going to sound bitter but I could have trained a monkey to do
her job..

You could have. But you could never have made the monkey make it to the
interview...

~~~
mcherm
> you could never have made the monkey make it to the interview

You phrased that correctly. The hard part wasn't to do a good job in the
interview, the hard part was getting invited to the interview in the first
place. And to be fair, Melissa Myers' resume justified her being considered
for the position.

------
blunte
Summary: Mayer earned $240 million for pushing Yahoo further into decline,
while a Yahoo investment that predated her skyrocketed, tripling Yahoo's stock
price during her tenure (despite her destructive impact).

~~~
pbhjpbhj
earned =/= was paid, IMO this is an important distinction.

------
jackmott
the salary is absurd for any outcome. anyone getting paid that much is
irresponsible, as is anyone paying then.

~~~
TheGrassyKnoll
Sure its absurd, but at least the Feds & state of California are going to get
a rather large chunk of it.

