It will also conclude the remarkable five-year run of Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, who was paid nearly a quarter of a billion
dollars — a generous sum even by Silicon Valley’s lofty standards — while presiding over the company’s continued decline.
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.
The surging value of those investments — not any brilliant business moves by Ms. Mayer — is why Yahoo’s shares went up.
By Wall Street’s most basic yardstick — Yahoo’s stock price — Ms. Mayer earned every penny she got.
After the $4.5 billion sale to Verizon, shareholders will still own an investment company
with $57 billion of stock in two Asian internet companies, Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan.
Ms. Mayer, who oversaw search at Google, also assigned more than 1,000 people to Yahoo’s search products,
which it had largely abandoned in 2009 when it sold its search operations to Microsoft.
“Was the return based on what she did?”
Still, managing those investments was a key reason that Yahoo’s board hired Ms. Mayer.
“Over the last five years, Yahoo shareholders couldn’t have done a lot better than this.”
She was essentially hired by one hedge-fund manager, Daniel S. Loeb, who got her predecessor fired and won three seats on Yahoo’s board in 2012.
To lure Ms. Mayer from Google and compensate her for options she forfeited there, Yahoo’s board offered her a lucrative employment agreement.
