16 ms·

Mayer $23M golden parachute as Yahoo names post-Verizon deal executive team

82 points by richardboegli 10y ago

jjtheblunt 10y ago
Absurdly ridiculous.
- ska 10y ago
  ... Otherwise known as "industry standard"
  - frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
    Perhaps the industry standard is absurdly ridiculous.
- nodesocket 10y ago
  In what sense? 3 million cash for an executive of a high profile public company that's quite a conservertive cash payment for that scenario.
  - hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
    The fact that "3 million in cash and 20 million equity" is considered a "conservative cash payment for that scenario" is basically the point: failure on a large scale is rewarded with grotesquely obscene riches while the peons are told to eat cake (or, rather, to stop buying iPhones so they can afford health care).
    - nodesocket 10y ago
      Except that most "peons" get their healthcare from their work and pay little to oftentimes no premiums. Yet, being self employed I pay full retail price ($500 a month) because I'm susbsizing others.
      - vtlynch 10y ago
        You're right, the peons have it so good. I heard Mayer is getting out of the executive life to become a call center drone.
      - delecti 10y ago
        It's less that you're subsidizing others and more that a) you aren't yourself being subsidized, and b) you've (in a sense) opted-out of an economy of scale. Though if you're reasonably young and healthy you are in fact subsidizing others, but not because you're self-employed.
    - rubber_duck 10y ago
      She was hired by people who agreed to pay her that under the conditions they did - those people didn't consider it grotesquely obscene and it was their decision - the only "problem" I see here is that you believe your opinion on her compensation and performance should matter. It's literally none of your business (even if you were an employee, and as a stock holder you could have voiced your opinion by selling, hell you could have even bet against them)
      - stephancoral 10y ago
        >It's literally none of your business It's a public company. It's our business to investigate it and criticize it. The problem is that CEOs get millions upon millions to fail whereas in an average americans life, a failure of comparable scale (that tanks your personal finances) is met with brutal harshness and almost no safety net. The cultural gap between what is acceptable for the rich and what is for everyone else is widening and causing serious problems in America, both economically and culturally.
      - khazhou 10y ago
        No one said the board didn't agree to pay her. The people who agreed to pay her obviously did not consider it obscene or they would not have approved it. They probably have similar compensation at their own companies. On Hacker News anyone can discuss their opinions and beliefs -- without arguing about whether said opinions and beliefs "should matter." "Literally none of your business" is expressly wrong if he's a shareholder. But even a non-shareholder employee in tech (or any industry) has a right to be concerned when one individual is compensated for being fired, at 200x the annual rate of a typical tech employee who performs well at their job.
      - hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
        > the only "problem" I see here is that you believe your opinion on her compensation and performance should matter Given that point of view, none of our opinions here matter, so why did you even bother commenting at all? I don't think I have some right to change her compensation, but medium/long term I worry about a real breakdown in society when there are such gross displays of outsized rewards for failure.
    - ericd 10y ago
      She took on a gargantuan (and potentially impossible) task, and put in years of her life to taking it on, when she almost certainly had other very highly paid options that were easier. And lots of people buying iPhones and new cars absolutely shouldn't be. Lack of fiscal responsibility is a very, very large problem in the US at the moment, not some imagining of the GOP or whoever else you're comparing to the old French aristocracy.
      - st3v3r 10y ago
        Yes, she worked hard. I guarantee you the person working two jobs to put their children through school is working harder.
        ericd 10y ago
        I mean that she probably had other offers that were easier but also very very lucrative, so Yahoo had to offer a lot to get her. Unfortunately, no one is probably willing to pay your hypothetical person that much. That is the whole difference. And your person doesn't necessarily work harder, iirc Mayer works a pretty insane schedule. But hard work by itself isn't worth that much, you have to have valuable skills to match, and being a good CEO at the large corporate scale is a pretty rare and extremely valuable skill.
  - throwawaysbdi 10y ago
    Its absurd for the highest paid employee to be paid more than 10x the lowest. It's not like a CEO is a hundred times smarter than the people one level below. The reality is that any of the executives could do the same job. At larger companies, what the hell is the difference between managing a division of 500 people or the whole company of 2500? Once you get to numbers that big it doesn't make a difference.
    - aerosmile 10y ago
      Here's the difference you're wondering about: the person managing the 500 people division does what the person managing the 2500 people company tells them to do. If the CEO is wrong with their strategy, the company loses a lot more money than the CEO's compensation. If the CEO is right, the company makes much more.
      - hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
        I actually don't have much of a problem if super successful CEOs are paid richly. But where is the risk/reward tradeoff? Why are they still paid so richly when they fail?
        aerosmile 10y ago
        Because of the opportunity cost. How does MM's parachute compare to 1) what she could have made as a CEO at other companies with more stable businesses, or 2) by simply staying at Google and enjoying her squeaky clean reputation. What she negotiated with Yahoo is likely a result of the market forces that existed at the time of her hire, and those market forces look different today. If the deal she negotiated was fair, the delta equals her parachute amount.
VikingCoder 10y ago
Quick reminder, there is no correlation between CEO pay and performance: http://www.motherjones.com/files/blog_ceo_pay_performance.jpg http://www.motherjones.com/files/blog_ceo_pay_performance.jp...
- ilyanep 10y ago
  I wonder how that chart measures "CEO pay". Since the majority of executive pay is equity (in this case, $20m of the $23m quoted figure), I'd say that CEO performance (as measured by stock returns) pretty directly affects their pay?
hnbroseph 10y ago
meanwhile, the median wage is ~ $30k. things are only getting worse.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- nodesocket 10y ago
  Perhaps we should change the name of Hacker News to Socialist News comrade.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - VikingCoder 10y ago
    One need not be a socialist to point out that businesses are making short-sighted decisions.
    - gloverkcn 10y ago
      History tells us that when inequality trends continue unchecked it's bad for the society as a whole.
  - throwawaysbdi 10y ago
    Sorry you're getting downvotes I found this hilarious. It was worth it :)
    - vtlynch 10y ago
      The downvotes are well deserved when you realize he is not joking at all
Upvoter33 10y ago
that is a sweet way to fail. don't blame her, though. there is only one real solution to this problem, unfortunately: much higher taxes once you start raking in absurd dollars. odds of that happening in US in near future: low.
- dottedmag 10y ago
  Don't you think CEO compensations will be even higher to compensate for higher taxes?
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    You're going to burn through company coffers quickly if the top tax rate is 90% at some income threshold around 7 figures ($1-9 million/year). Precedent: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/15/bernie-s/income-tax-rates-were-90-percent-under-eisenhower-/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/... "In 1944-45, during World War II, couples making more than $200,000 faced an all-time high of 94 percent. Sanders said income tax rates under Eisenhower were as high as 90 percent. A look through the records shows that top earners in the eight years of Eisenhower's presidency paid a top income tax rate of 91 percent."
    - nugget 10y ago
      A job is the means by which you convert human capital to financial capital. If taxes are raised on direct compensation, this conversion becomes less efficient. Talented executives would likely exploit opportunities to earn stock at artificially low valuations. You can do this by joining startups or private companies who typically have more flexibility with valuations. This could make public companies relatively less attractive to talent, and they could suffer as a result. To the extent that retail investors and pension funds have more access to public companies than private companies or startups, they could suffer as well. If you theoretically limited all compensation then you would distort the market in other ways - beyond a certain amount of cash and stock compensation (taxed at confiscatory rates), I would start to optimize for things like multiple secretaries, nepotism, a massive office, and other items which wouldn't necessarily help the business.
transfire 10y ago
Money for nothin and your dicks for free.
- sctb 10y ago
  Please don't comment uncivilly and unsubstantively like this here.
danso 10y ago
I'm assuming this amount was agreed upon before she accepted the job at the helm of a company that was expected to go the way it did, e.g. split from its most valued asset, Alibaba? I don't see that as being a "reward" for failure. Although I do wonder what was the point of having a high-profile CEO when most shareholders were waiting to cash out on the Alibaba sale? In 2013, Bloomberg estimated that Yahoo's non-Alibaba worth was "as little as $4 billion" [0], so getting sold for $4.4 billion 3 years later isn't success, but it isn't abject failure either. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-16/how-much-is-yahoo-worth-without-alibaba-not-much https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-16/how-much-...
- rayuela 10y ago
  That's an annual return of 3.2% during a period of time when the S&P500 did 18.9%. That's a pretty shit return if you ask me.
  - danso 10y ago
    The 10-year chart of Yahoo's stock shows that the company had sunk to a plateau of ~$15/share from 2008 to 2012, after peaking at $31 in 2007. I'm assuming the stock's steep rise post-2012 was related to the anticipate sale of the Alibaba stake: https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/YHOO#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI6ZmFsc2UsImJvbGxpbmdlclVwcGVyQ29sb3IiOiIjZTIwMDgxIiwiYm9sbGluZ2VyTG93ZXJDb2xvciI6IiM5NTUyZmYiLCJtZmlMaW5lQ29sb3IiOiIjNDVlM2ZmIiwibWFjZERpdmVyZ2VuY2VDb2xvciI6IiNmZjdiMTIiLCJtYWNkTWFjZENvbG9yIjoiIzc4N2Q4MiIsIm1hY2RTaWduYWxDb2xvciI6IiMwMDAwMDAiLCJyc2lMaW5lQ29sb3IiOiIjZmZiNzAwIiwic3RvY2hLTGluZUNvbG9yIjoiI2ZmYjcwMCIsInN0b2NoRExpbmVDb2xvciI6IiM0NWUzZmYiLCJyYW5nZSI6IjEweSJ9 https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/YHOO#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI... Maybe the rest of the market was growing, but it didn't seem like Yahoo sans Alibaba was heading in that direction.
gloverkcn 10y ago
People who are criticizing Mayer's deal are failing to realize that Mayer had better options than taking over as head of yahoo. She was a bright star who could have gone to any number of companies. Nobody in the tech community would have categorized Yahoo as "ready for a turn around". Companies that large that have been mismanaged for so long are filled with middle managers that are better at internal politics than driving initiatives. The odds of yahoo turning around were extremely low. They had to put a deal together to entice someone who had a good reputation from a leading tech company to put their name on the line to go try and sort out a giant mess. If your gripe is the difference between her salary and the lowest paid then I understand. That doesn't mean you bash Mayer for playing by the rules that society has set up. Good for her for getting paid. That makes you no different than the middle manager who isn't helping their team push forward but instead is sitting in meetings taking pot shots at everyone else. Support a law that says the top executive can't make x times the total comp of the lowest paid. Of course every law like that will create incentives to structure companies to maximize payments to execs. those conversations would add more to our discussion than just throwing rocks.
- iaw 10y ago
  > People who are criticizing Mayer's deal are failing to realize that Mayer had better options than taking over as head of yahoo. Could you provide sources for this? What opportunities were available to Mayer better than being an executive of a multi-billion dollar giant like Yahoo? Edit: I'm seeing a lot of speculative replies but none that demonstrate an 8 to 9 figure payday from 5 years of sitting in place. Does anyone have an example of an alternative that would've yielded her this much wealth?
  - kornish 10y ago
    Well, for one, being an executive at a multi-billion dollar giant which was growing or doing well. edit: by "executive", I was including the whole C-suite – should have clarified.
    - pmlnr 10y ago
tantalor 10y ago
Interesting that the future CEO will work out of NYC (presumably the 229 West 43rd Street building) rather than the Sunnyvale headquarters.
- praneshp 10y ago
  I guess the sunnyvale office will remain the tech/core-business part, that is going to Verizon?
- harryh 10y ago
  The Sunnyvale headquarters will be part of Verizon. The future CEO will be managing a company that is basically just a holding company for Alibaba stock.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
So nearly a $100M pay cut from the original exit package valued at "up to" $110M[1]. I still think she is the perfect pick for COO of Uber. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/07/technology/marissa-mayer-severance-package/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/07/technology/marissa-mayer-sev...
- M_Grey 10y ago
  You think she has some kind of fetish for sinking ships?
- grandalf 10y ago
  > I still think she is the perfect pick for COO of Uber. This is a great idea. I think if it looked like she'd take the position she'd get a call from Larry and Sergey asking her to do them a favor and not take the position so Alphabet would have a chance in that market. They'd likely be willing to let her be CEO of one of the other Alphabet companies to discourage her from going to Uber.
- acjohnson55 10y ago
  Or CEO. They need a change at the top IMO.
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    I was thinking more about the "optics." What says you are serious about sexual harassment in the workplace then putting a woman in the role of being able to evaluate and fire the harassers. I also think Marissa needs a bit of rehabilitation in her career, the Yahoo! period did not, in my opinion, improve her 'brand'. So the COO job where the 'company killing decisions' are someone else's and the execution against goals is all on her, would give her a chance to show that she can move the company to achieve its goals, and thus burnish her reputation for more than just product focus. In my experience watching the comings and goings of executives in tech it's rare when there are two executives that need each other this much.
mindcrash 10y ago
Because the Yahoo-Verizon merger is kind of confusing: this is not about the parts (Yahoo.com, Tumblr, Flickr etc.) which are about to merge into Verizon. This is actually about the spinoff containing the assets which will stay separate. Who eventually is going to run the parts at Verizon (which will not be Mayer) is as of yet unknown I believe.
rl3 10y ago
If only I could make that much by reading children's stories[0] to thousands of professionals at a time in obtuse fashion. [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-childrens-book-bobbie-had-a-nickel-2015-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-childrens-book-...
bahmboo 10y ago
California + probable 280G = 70%+ tax
test678779 10y ago
Question to folks here. Is it still worth joining Yahoo as an engineer (if yo u are not able to manage Goog/Facebook/Apple/Amazon? What are the risks due to Verizon takeover?
SliderUp 10y ago
Good for her. A ton of CEOs have done far worse for their shareholders and done as well with their exit package.

82 points by richardboegli 10y ago

jjtheblunt 10y ago

Absurdly ridiculous.

ska 10y ago
... Otherwise known as "industry standard"
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
  Perhaps the industry standard is absurdly ridiculous.
nodesocket 10y ago
In what sense? 3 million cash for an executive of a high profile public company that's quite a conservertive cash payment for that scenario.
- hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
  The fact that "3 million in cash and 20 million equity" is considered a "conservative cash payment for that scenario" is basically the point: failure on a large scale is rewarded with grotesquely obscene riches while the peons are told to eat cake (or, rather, to stop buying iPhones so they can afford health care).
  - nodesocket 10y ago
    Except that most "peons" get their healthcare from their work and pay little to oftentimes no premiums. Yet, being self employed I pay full retail price ($500 a month) because I'm susbsizing others.
    - vtlynch 10y ago
      You're right, the peons have it so good. I heard Mayer is getting out of the executive life to become a call center drone.
    - delecti 10y ago
      It's less that you're subsidizing others and more that a) you aren't yourself being subsidized, and b) you've (in a sense) opted-out of an economy of scale. Though if you're reasonably young and healthy you are in fact subsidizing others, but not because you're self-employed.
  - rubber_duck 10y ago
    She was hired by people who agreed to pay her that under the conditions they did - those people didn't consider it grotesquely obscene and it was their decision - the only "problem" I see here is that you believe your opinion on her compensation and performance should matter. It's literally none of your business (even if you were an employee, and as a stock holder you could have voiced your opinion by selling, hell you could have even bet against them)
    - stephancoral 10y ago
      >It's literally none of your business It's a public company. It's our business to investigate it and criticize it. The problem is that CEOs get millions upon millions to fail whereas in an average americans life, a failure of comparable scale (that tanks your personal finances) is met with brutal harshness and almost no safety net. The cultural gap between what is acceptable for the rich and what is for everyone else is widening and causing serious problems in America, both economically and culturally.
    - khazhou 10y ago
      No one said the board didn't agree to pay her. The people who agreed to pay her obviously did not consider it obscene or they would not have approved it. They probably have similar compensation at their own companies. On Hacker News anyone can discuss their opinions and beliefs -- without arguing about whether said opinions and beliefs "should matter." "Literally none of your business" is expressly wrong if he's a shareholder. But even a non-shareholder employee in tech (or any industry) has a right to be concerned when one individual is compensated for being fired, at 200x the annual rate of a typical tech employee who performs well at their job.
    - hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
      > the only "problem" I see here is that you believe your opinion on her compensation and performance should matter Given that point of view, none of our opinions here matter, so why did you even bother commenting at all? I don't think I have some right to change her compensation, but medium/long term I worry about a real breakdown in society when there are such gross displays of outsized rewards for failure.
  - ericd 10y ago
    She took on a gargantuan (and potentially impossible) task, and put in years of her life to taking it on, when she almost certainly had other very highly paid options that were easier. And lots of people buying iPhones and new cars absolutely shouldn't be. Lack of fiscal responsibility is a very, very large problem in the US at the moment, not some imagining of the GOP or whoever else you're comparing to the old French aristocracy.
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      Yes, she worked hard. I guarantee you the person working two jobs to put their children through school is working harder.
      - ericd 10y ago
        I mean that she probably had other offers that were easier but also very very lucrative, so Yahoo had to offer a lot to get her. Unfortunately, no one is probably willing to pay your hypothetical person that much. That is the whole difference. And your person doesn't necessarily work harder, iirc Mayer works a pretty insane schedule. But hard work by itself isn't worth that much, you have to have valuable skills to match, and being a good CEO at the large corporate scale is a pretty rare and extremely valuable skill.
- throwawaysbdi 10y ago
  Its absurd for the highest paid employee to be paid more than 10x the lowest. It's not like a CEO is a hundred times smarter than the people one level below. The reality is that any of the executives could do the same job. At larger companies, what the hell is the difference between managing a division of 500 people or the whole company of 2500? Once you get to numbers that big it doesn't make a difference.
  - aerosmile 10y ago
    Here's the difference you're wondering about: the person managing the 500 people division does what the person managing the 2500 people company tells them to do. If the CEO is wrong with their strategy, the company loses a lot more money than the CEO's compensation. If the CEO is right, the company makes much more.
    - hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
      I actually don't have much of a problem if super successful CEOs are paid richly. But where is the risk/reward tradeoff? Why are they still paid so richly when they fail?
      - aerosmile 10y ago
        Because of the opportunity cost. How does MM's parachute compare to 1) what she could have made as a CEO at other companies with more stable businesses, or 2) by simply staying at Google and enjoying her squeaky clean reputation. What she negotiated with Yahoo is likely a result of the market forces that existed at the time of her hire, and those market forces look different today. If the deal she negotiated was fair, the delta equals her parachute amount.

VikingCoder 10y ago

Quick reminder, there is no correlation between CEO pay and performance: http://www.motherjones.com/files/blog_ceo_pay_performance.jpg http://www.motherjones.com/files/blog_ceo_pay_performance.jp...

ilyanep 10y ago
I wonder how that chart measures "CEO pay". Since the majority of executive pay is equity (in this case, $20m of the $23m quoted figure), I'd say that CEO performance (as measured by stock returns) pretty directly affects their pay?

hnbroseph 10y ago

meanwhile, the median wage is ~ $30k. things are only getting worse.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nodesocket 10y ago
Perhaps we should change the name of Hacker News to Socialist News comrade.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- VikingCoder 10y ago
  One need not be a socialist to point out that businesses are making short-sighted decisions.
  - gloverkcn 10y ago
    History tells us that when inequality trends continue unchecked it's bad for the society as a whole.
- throwawaysbdi 10y ago
  Sorry you're getting downvotes I found this hilarious. It was worth it :)
  - vtlynch 10y ago
    The downvotes are well deserved when you realize he is not joking at all

Upvoter33 10y ago

that is a sweet way to fail. don't blame her, though. there is only one real solution to this problem, unfortunately: much higher taxes once you start raking in absurd dollars. odds of that happening in US in near future: low.

dottedmag 10y ago
Don't you think CEO compensations will be even higher to compensate for higher taxes?
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  You're going to burn through company coffers quickly if the top tax rate is 90% at some income threshold around 7 figures ($1-9 million/year). Precedent: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/15/bernie-s/income-tax-rates-were-90-percent-under-eisenhower-/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/... "In 1944-45, during World War II, couples making more than $200,000 faced an all-time high of 94 percent. Sanders said income tax rates under Eisenhower were as high as 90 percent. A look through the records shows that top earners in the eight years of Eisenhower's presidency paid a top income tax rate of 91 percent."
  - nugget 10y ago
    A job is the means by which you convert human capital to financial capital. If taxes are raised on direct compensation, this conversion becomes less efficient. Talented executives would likely exploit opportunities to earn stock at artificially low valuations. You can do this by joining startups or private companies who typically have more flexibility with valuations. This could make public companies relatively less attractive to talent, and they could suffer as a result. To the extent that retail investors and pension funds have more access to public companies than private companies or startups, they could suffer as well. If you theoretically limited all compensation then you would distort the market in other ways - beyond a certain amount of cash and stock compensation (taxed at confiscatory rates), I would start to optimize for things like multiple secretaries, nepotism, a massive office, and other items which wouldn't necessarily help the business.

transfire 10y ago

Money for nothin and your dicks for free.

sctb 10y ago
Please don't comment uncivilly and unsubstantively like this here.

danso 10y ago

I'm assuming this amount was agreed upon before she accepted the job at the helm of a company that was expected to go the way it did, e.g. split from its most valued asset, Alibaba? I don't see that as being a "reward" for failure. Although I do wonder what was the point of having a high-profile CEO when most shareholders were waiting to cash out on the Alibaba sale? In 2013, Bloomberg estimated that Yahoo's non-Alibaba worth was "as little as $4 billion" [0], so getting sold for $4.4 billion 3 years later isn't success, but it isn't abject failure either. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-16/how-much-is-yahoo-worth-without-alibaba-not-much https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-16/how-much-...

rayuela 10y ago
That's an annual return of 3.2% during a period of time when the S&P500 did 18.9%. That's a pretty shit return if you ask me.
- danso 10y ago
  The 10-year chart of Yahoo's stock shows that the company had sunk to a plateau of ~$15/share from 2008 to 2012, after peaking at $31 in 2007. I'm assuming the stock's steep rise post-2012 was related to the anticipate sale of the Alibaba stake: https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/YHOO#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI6ZmFsc2UsImJvbGxpbmdlclVwcGVyQ29sb3IiOiIjZTIwMDgxIiwiYm9sbGluZ2VyTG93ZXJDb2xvciI6IiM5NTUyZmYiLCJtZmlMaW5lQ29sb3IiOiIjNDVlM2ZmIiwibWFjZERpdmVyZ2VuY2VDb2xvciI6IiNmZjdiMTIiLCJtYWNkTWFjZENvbG9yIjoiIzc4N2Q4MiIsIm1hY2RTaWduYWxDb2xvciI6IiMwMDAwMDAiLCJyc2lMaW5lQ29sb3IiOiIjZmZiNzAwIiwic3RvY2hLTGluZUNvbG9yIjoiI2ZmYjcwMCIsInN0b2NoRExpbmVDb2xvciI6IiM0NWUzZmYiLCJyYW5nZSI6IjEweSJ9 https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/YHOO#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI... Maybe the rest of the market was growing, but it didn't seem like Yahoo sans Alibaba was heading in that direction.

gloverkcn 10y ago

People who are criticizing Mayer's deal are failing to realize that Mayer had better options than taking over as head of yahoo. She was a bright star who could have gone to any number of companies. Nobody in the tech community would have categorized Yahoo as "ready for a turn around". Companies that large that have been mismanaged for so long are filled with middle managers that are better at internal politics than driving initiatives. The odds of yahoo turning around were extremely low. They had to put a deal together to entice someone who had a good reputation from a leading tech company to put their name on the line to go try and sort out a giant mess. If your gripe is the difference between her salary and the lowest paid then I understand. That doesn't mean you bash Mayer for playing by the rules that society has set up. Good for her for getting paid. That makes you no different than the middle manager who isn't helping their team push forward but instead is sitting in meetings taking pot shots at everyone else. Support a law that says the top executive can't make x times the total comp of the lowest paid. Of course every law like that will create incentives to structure companies to maximize payments to execs. those conversations would add more to our discussion than just throwing rocks.

iaw 10y ago
> People who are criticizing Mayer's deal are failing to realize that Mayer had better options than taking over as head of yahoo. Could you provide sources for this? What opportunities were available to Mayer better than being an executive of a multi-billion dollar giant like Yahoo? Edit: I'm seeing a lot of speculative replies but none that demonstrate an 8 to 9 figure payday from 5 years of sitting in place. Does anyone have an example of an alternative that would've yielded her this much wealth?
- kornish 10y ago
  Well, for one, being an executive at a multi-billion dollar giant which was growing or doing well. edit: by "executive", I was including the whole C-suite – should have clarified.
  - pmlnr 10y ago

tantalor 10y ago

Interesting that the future CEO will work out of NYC (presumably the 229 West 43rd Street building) rather than the Sunnyvale headquarters.

praneshp 10y ago
I guess the sunnyvale office will remain the tech/core-business part, that is going to Verizon?
harryh 10y ago
The Sunnyvale headquarters will be part of Verizon. The future CEO will be managing a company that is basically just a holding company for Alibaba stock.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

So nearly a $100M pay cut from the original exit package valued at "up to" $110M[1]. I still think she is the perfect pick for COO of Uber. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/07/technology/marissa-mayer-severance-package/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/07/technology/marissa-mayer-sev...

M_Grey 10y ago
You think she has some kind of fetish for sinking ships?
grandalf 10y ago
> I still think she is the perfect pick for COO of Uber. This is a great idea. I think if it looked like she'd take the position she'd get a call from Larry and Sergey asking her to do them a favor and not take the position so Alphabet would have a chance in that market. They'd likely be willing to let her be CEO of one of the other Alphabet companies to discourage her from going to Uber.
acjohnson55 10y ago
Or CEO. They need a change at the top IMO.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  I was thinking more about the "optics." What says you are serious about sexual harassment in the workplace then putting a woman in the role of being able to evaluate and fire the harassers. I also think Marissa needs a bit of rehabilitation in her career, the Yahoo! period did not, in my opinion, improve her 'brand'. So the COO job where the 'company killing decisions' are someone else's and the execution against goals is all on her, would give her a chance to show that she can move the company to achieve its goals, and thus burnish her reputation for more than just product focus. In my experience watching the comings and goings of executives in tech it's rare when there are two executives that need each other this much.

mindcrash 10y ago

Because the Yahoo-Verizon merger is kind of confusing: this is not about the parts (Yahoo.com, Tumblr, Flickr etc.) which are about to merge into Verizon. This is actually about the spinoff containing the assets which will stay separate. Who eventually is going to run the parts at Verizon (which will not be Mayer) is as of yet unknown I believe.

rl3 10y ago

If only I could make that much by reading children's stories[0] to thousands of professionals at a time in obtuse fashion. [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-childrens-book-bobbie-had-a-nickel-2015-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-childrens-book-...

bahmboo 10y ago

California + probable 280G = 70%+ tax

test678779 10y ago

Question to folks here. Is it still worth joining Yahoo as an engineer (if yo u are not able to manage Goog/Facebook/Apple/Amazon? What are the risks due to Verizon takeover?

SliderUp 10y ago

Good for her. A ton of CEOs have done far worse for their shareholders and done as well with their exit package.