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Yahoo's Marissa Mayer In Line For $55M Severance If Fired Within A Year Of Sale (nytimes.com) 181

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.
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Yahoo's Marissa Mayer In Line For $55M Severance If Fired Within A Year Of Sale

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  • Bah! (Score:3, Informative)

    by DaMattster ( 977781 ) on Saturday April 30, 2016 @09:32AM (#52018347)
    She shouldn't get jack shit! Tossed out on her ass. She upended many people's lives by discontinuing the work from home option. She only cares about Marissa Mayer.
    • Re:Bah! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30, 2016 @09:51AM (#52018451)

      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.

      • Re:Bah! (Score:5, Informative)

        by BarbaraHudson ( 3785311 ) <barbara@jane@hudson.icloud@com> on Saturday April 30, 2016 @10:06AM (#52018547) Journal
        This happens because directors who sit on many boards want to make sure that when they get the boot, the huge payout will be easier to justify - "Just look at what they got for tanking the company." It has zero to do with performance, or they would have just fired her. It's not like they had to agree to this deal
        • It's money laundering. "Undocumented" income suddenly finds itself on paper, squeaky clean. And no doubt it can be written off.

        • Re:Bah! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Saturday April 30, 2016 @10:57AM (#52018741) Journal
          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.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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 an

          • 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?

            Shareholder vote primarily by buying and selling. And shareholders are asked constantly about what they think, namely when someone else offers to buy their shares at the current price. When Mayer was hired in 2012, the stock price didn't change much.

            • by Anonymous Coward

              Uh, no.

              There has been a long effort by shareholders to discipline CEO pay. A quick search will reveal the thousands of stories of shareholders voting against any increases, and in fact the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was passed in part to address this very issue.

              http://www.nasdaq.com/article/shire-shareholders-rebel-over-ceo-payupdate-20160428-01096

              But they don't sit on the board and don't get to make that decision.

              Conversely, there are numerous stories of shareholders making o

              • What an idiot - you need to get a geography lesson. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act doesn't apply to companies headquartered in Ireland. Also, the guy still got his increase, despite shareholders being against it. The shareholders can, of course vote out the board of directors, but that's a different story than having any direct say in CEO pay.
      • They shouldn't automatically get millions just for taking on a risky job.

        Well, the people who are actually putting up the money think differently. They were betting that they needed a big name for their company, someone who would appeal to the tastes of the Silicon Valley elites. To get that, they needed to pay top dollar. Was it a good choice? Who knows. When they hired Mayer, Yahoo was already in deep trouble, so maybe she did as best as anybody could have.

        In different words, it's not your decision to mak

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        RISK, what fucking risk. Being an over paid lame arse for a few years with a massive golden parachute at the end of it, WHAT FUCKING RISK?!?

        Demoted as useless at Google, pretends otherwise but proves it at Yahoo, bringing nothing and just trying to the same old, same old, steal other people's idea and claim them as her own, which is why she wanted everyone in the office, to do exactly that. Perhaps she can get a job a Mars and she can be a spokesperson for https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com].

      • by Tensor ( 102132 )
        Maybe, even better!, you can do whatever you want with your company and let them do whatever they want with theirs. if people like what you do they&#180;ll put money into your company and out of theirs ... almost like an equilibrium of sorts
    • by elrous0 ( 869638 )

      Consider it a $55 million stupidity fine on the Yahoo board for being stupid enough to buy into a bunch of "A female CEO will fix everything!" SJW bullshit.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 )
      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.
    • by Zeio ( 325157 )

      I really, really dislike this fraud Mayer. She should be in prison for the embezzling and lack of fiduciary responsibility during her tenure as CEO. She has caused the loss of thousands of jobs. I used to talk about how bad this Mayer was before she took the helm and people poo-pooed me. I turned out I was 100% correct about this woman being a know-nothing fraud. She was also hated at Google just as much. She is a low life criminal as far as I'm concerned.

      • Re:Bah! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Saturday April 30, 2016 @11:01AM (#52018753)

        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

    • by Tensor ( 102132 )
      Sad.

      This is not how real life works.

      She signed a contract, this is in it. period. Are you really suggesting with a straight face that it would be ok for a company to unilaterally break a binding work contract cos she made people ACTUALLY GO TO WORK ?? ... indeed, the devil incarnate, burn the bitch !!!

      This is exactly the kind of entitlement problem that faces the workforce today. Yours obviously, not hers. Me? i&#180;d just want to know who she hired to negotiate her contract!
  • by headkase ( 533448 ) on Saturday April 30, 2016 @09:34AM (#52018353)

    And therein lies the problem. Yahoo! isn't relevant any longer. I don't even know the last time I even thought of it.

    • And where did they get 55 million, I wonder if that's space cash?
      • From the summary:

        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.

        $55M is more of an idea, a gesture. It is Yahoo! stock, I assume.

      • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        And how does handing someone who's leaving the company huge sums of money benefit the shareholders?

    • Re:What's Yahoo?! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Saturday April 30, 2016 @03:37PM (#52019797) Journal
      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.
    • I like yahoo mail tons better than Gmail. (I hqave a hard time making sense of google's threaded emails).

      I also have not found an RSS newsreader I like better than my.yahoo. I've been using it since 1997.

  • by inode_buddha ( 576844 ) on Saturday April 30, 2016 @09:35AM (#52018359) Journal

    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.

    • If you have to ask where to get that kind of job, you're certainly not in the market for such a job.

      But you're right, "hard work" as most people understand it, isn't what gets you a big CEO job. It's results. Can you run a company? Can you run a large team of any kind?

      Yes, one could argue that Merissa Mayer hasn't gotten results for Yahoo. But that would be overlooking the fact that she started with a dying company. No, it's not robust, but it does look like she'll be able to get someone to pay million

      • Hard work plus being born on at least 2nd base.
        Most likely attended private schooling with other ceos (I was reading a retrospective on a CEO who died a few years ago and it had 3 other CEO's who went to the same junior high school (middle school for most of you whipper snappers under 35) with him.

        We don't have that many CEO's in the country. Yet multiple CEO's went to the same prestigious middle school

        Likewise, the boards are stocked with people from old money and some celebrities (who might be new money

      • by schnell ( 163007 )

        Yes, one could argue that Merissa Mayer hasn't gotten results for Yahoo. But that would be overlooking the fact that she started with a dying company. No, it's not robust, but it does look like she'll be able to get someone to pay millions for the company, problems and all. Can you do that?

        Precisely this. It mystifies me why people still don't understand how what you get paid is determined in a market environment. (This is not applicable in a unionized or government environment where all employees are assumed to be fungible in terms of skills and compensation is based on "how long have you been here?")

        How much you get paid is not based on how hard your job is, or how good you are at it, but how scarce your skill set is, and how important that skill set is. To wit:

        • Starting NFL left tackles
  • by Anonymous Coward

    She will still leave and have enough money to sit around and do nothing for the rest of her life. I'm not bitter about these CEOs, but this is a pattern that needs to be broken. If you underperform, you're gone--just like an underling would be gone. Walked to the door by security with your box of personal things.

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      sit around and do nothing for the rest of her life.

      But that's not likely. Many of these people have friends on other corporate boards who will find a place for them. The whole Yahoo failure will have a positive spin put on it and Mayer will find herself running another company.

      If the demise of Yahoo was inevitable, she might do OK with a viable company. The only issue will be why this wasn't recognized in advance and the company dismantled while its parts were worth something. On the other hand, after the last economic downturn, that might have been a fire

    • by hambone142 ( 2551854 ) on Saturday April 30, 2016 @11:50AM (#52018955)

      Naw. Failed female CEOs run for Governor or Vice President.

    • Being able to live on the golden parachute for the rest of your life is a big part of the justification. The theory goes that you want CEOs who are willing to take risks, because companies that always try to play it safe tend to fail. If you're a CEO who takes a risk that doesn't work out, then you're going to find it hard to get another job, because people will point at your previous experience (this is where it starts to fall down - in all likelihood, a CEO who ran one company into the ground will immed

  • But.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30, 2016 @09:40AM (#52018381)

    Does she have to train her replacement?

  • If she does get fired in the next year, she can always run against Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein in the 2018 election. Maybe she will be less annoying and more successful than the last CEO who ran in California.
    • by sconeu ( 64226 )

      Didn't she run against Jerry Brown for Governor at the same time Carly ran against Boxer?

      • Didn't she run against Jerry Brown for Governor at the same time Carly ran against Boxer?

        You're thinking of Meg Whitman, formerly of eBay and currently at HP.

      • by sconeu ( 64226 )

        Shit. That was Meg Whitman. Never mind.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30, 2016 @09:45AM (#52018411)
    What's that in MALE failed CEO dollars? 71 mil?
    • What's that in MALE failed CEO dollars? 71 mil?

      Not quite. Since according to that bastion of conservative propaganda USA Today [usatoday.com], female CEO average pay in fiscal year 2015 was about 50% higher than male average CEO pay (18.8 vs 12.7 million), it looks like that would be something like 47.3 million male failed CEO dollars.

  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday April 30, 2016 @09:51AM (#52018445)

    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.

  • The only yahoo function I have used is the Groups, and it was horrible to begin with, and they kept making it worse.
    • yahoo.com makes a good trash email address to dump spam when a website requires an email address.
    • by Agripa ( 139780 )

      The exodus has started from Yahoo Groups. They have not made their horrible interface worse in the past couple of weeks however there is every expectation that they will be discontinued or destroyed shortly.

      I wonder what will happen to the email services they provide to ISPs like AT&T which already work poorly or not at all.

  • This is crazy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30, 2016 @10:05AM (#52018543)

    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.

  • by Marginal Coward ( 3557951 ) on Saturday April 30, 2016 @10:15AM (#52018597)

    A TV pundit recently observed that each CEO of Yahoo has walked away with significant compensation after a short term, yet the stockholders have gotten nada in the form of dividends. And they may not get much when it's eventually sold off, or will get nothing if it goes bankrupt (which is less likely.)

    Ironically, I rely on Yahoo's "Finance" section for much of my own stock-picking: its "Key Statistics" page is by far my favorite one-page stock statistic summary. Here are some highlights (read: lowlights) for YHOO itself [yahoo.com]:

        Profit Margin (ttm): -87.74%
        Return on Assets (ttm): -0.16%
        Return on Equity (ttm): -12.82%
        Trailing Annual Dividend Yield3: N/A

    This paints a picture of a company that is losing money (negative profit margin), hasn't managed its assets well (negative return on assets and return on equity), and doesn't treat stockholders well (see ROA and ROE, together with no dividend.) Next, throw in a history of expensive golden parachutes to short-term CEOs and you've got a stock that no one (IMHO) should ever own.

    Sadly, those of us who have part of our money in S&P 500 funds have a few bucks that get to go along on this horrifying ride.

    • New and data aggregator: is (and was) the only thing Yahoo did well.

      I always liked their sports app and sports news. Seems like they never really figured out how to make money in the web 2.0 world like the other bigs managed to do. They sure spent money like crazy tho. Alibaba was a good investment for them, all the rest seemed to fizzle.
    • by wwalker ( 159341 )

      I don't understand how the board, or whoever decides on these ridiculous amounts of money to compensate worthless CEOs for their incompetence, how are they all not sued into oblivion yet? Don't all public companies have fiduciary duty (whatever that means) to do everything in the best interest of the shareholders? How's $36 million to walk away from your job after a year is in the best interest of shareholders, when the company is firmly in the red? Or all *EO's and the board are somehow shielded, because i

      • Don't all public companies have fiduciary duty (whatever that means) to do everything in the best interest of the shareholders?

        Therein lies the rub: it's hard to prosecute on "whatever that means." So, all that we investors can do is vote with our dollars. However, looking at YHOO's major owners [yahoo.com], the top ones seem to be S&P 500 funds, which presumably aren't any more activist than S&P itself. I guess that's anecdotal evidence that those of us who are (mostly) stock pickers have a good shot at doing better in that portion of our investments.

  • Hate on Marissa Mayer all you want, but Yahoo was a sinking ship long before she took the helm. Yahoo's search is surprisingly bad (please try it if you don't believe me) and Yahoo Games sold out long ago. They have talented scientists, but like Microsoft and HP, the management culture is very successful at muting talent.
  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Saturday April 30, 2016 @11:04AM (#52018757)

    Has anyone done a careful study to determine if high CEO compensation results in better company performance? The issue of correlation will have to account for the desire of greedy candidates for a CEO job to get on board with a company that is or will generate a lot of cash and profit so as to make a multi-million dollar pay package look justified.

    Anecdote: Many years ago*, I read a story about a small California oil company that had been driven into bankruptcy. The CEO had walked (or been canned) and a bankruptcy court judge assigned. As is customary, the judge appointed an interim manager to oversee the company through what was probably going to be a dissolution. But the company was such a basket case (and the potential pay so low), the only person he could find was a friend of his who was a janitor. The janitor proceeded to go through company records, find underperforming assets to sell, reorganize the core organization and bring the company out of the bankruptcy process as a profitable business. All for what was no more than a few times his janitor's salary.

    *This predates the birth of the Internet by some years, so I'm having trouble searching for a story on-line. IIRC, it was written up in the WSJ.

    • Has anyone done a careful study to determine if high CEO compensation results in better company performance?

      Someone did a study a year or two back and there was a correlation. High CEO pay correlated with low performance.

    • by Lucidus ( 681639 )

      There was a study, published in 2014 by the University of Utah, which found a negative correlation. Companies with highly paid execs did significantly worse than companies run by mere mortals. You should Google it; the details are interesting.

  • We have as female CEO of a California tech company. Fired on performance. Sounds like possible VP pick.
  • Don't forget that someone representing the company (presumably the board of directors) hired her and entered into a contract that explicitly spelled out the severance in the event of early termination. The company agreed to this in advance. Go ahead and complain about the actions she took or didn't take. Go ahead and complain that she didn't save the company (if even that were possible). If you are going to complain about the severance, don't complain about the CEO, complain about the company that entered i
    • Don't forget that someone representing the company (presumably the board of directors) hired her and entered into a contract that explicitly spelled out the severance in the event of early termination. The company agreed to this in advance.

      Why is it being reported just now and not when she was hired? No, I think that this is a new benefit that has just been put in place, after she has failed to do anything to turn around Yahoo's business.

  • by BenJeremy ( 181303 ) on Saturday April 30, 2016 @12:10PM (#52019051)

    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.

  • Is anyone else a little annoyed by the Marissa Mayer in 90 second linked video. They seem to give her way more credit for innovation at google like maps. That's something they bought and while she headed the map team for a while there is sparse evidence that she is responsible for that innovation or really any other innovation.

    Look she was lucky, she was employee number 20 at a very profitable company, who was a nice piece of ass, who banged one of the founders for a while. But after a while it was clear sh

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I don't think that Mayer has done a very good job with Yahoo, but that said, Yahoo was probably screwed long before she got there.

    What is admirable, is that she has managed to make (at least) 10's of millions a year, and have three kids at Yahoo, with their nanny and daycare room right next to her office, while looking good doing it.

    Make fun of her all you want, but I bet she had a higher salary with better parental benefits and a severance packages than any of us have gotten.

  • Anyone looking at the Yahoo CEO position knows that sooner or later the major shareholders are going to demand something irrational or impossible. The only way they'd take to job if the were guaranteed to get paid for honestly trying to run the company up to the point that they were asked to produce a unicorn.

  • To be entirely fair to her, I don't think I'd be able to run a company nearly as badly as she has. I mean, sure, I'd be an incompetent CEO of anything, but I'm sure I'd accidentally make some good decisions along the way. Yahoo is frequently valued below the actual amount of cash that they have on hand. To get a company to that point requires a lifetime of experience with bad decision making and leadership. That commands a high premium!
  • "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."

    Look at me, I suck at my job. Pay me a shitload of money, because.

    Disgusting bullshit.
  • by kamapuaa ( 555446 ) on Saturday April 30, 2016 @05:51PM (#52020399) Homepage

    For all the people talking about how she's tanked the stock...She came in while the stock was at 15 and a half, and today the stock is at 36 and a half [yahoo.com]. OK, big surprise, she wasn't able to turn the company into the next Google. But the market cap has climbed from $14 Billion to $34 Billion under watch. I don't think you can call her an abject failure. An abject failure would be losing her shareholders value. Like maybe she sold Yahoo's investments that are the core of its modern business, in order to fund one of her relatively minor pet projects that didn't work out.

  • by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Sunday May 01, 2016 @06:37AM (#52021947)
    She was hired to be the CEO. And CEOs severance packages, in big companies, are usually within that range. This is the job to have in the industry, where incompetence is not seen as a failure, but rather a "failed try". Not so many jobs carry that amount of "tolerance", but yet there are some: football/base ball/tennis/.... player who doesn't perform as expected (and yet is (pre) paid a lot), an expensive actor/actress who plays badly, ...
  • Factor out the value of the Alibaba stake, which she had nothing to do with, and you get a much clearer picture of Marissa's Mayer's management talent. Honestly, her talents lend themselves better to some other room than the boardroom.

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