I don't believe that if you just throw enough smart managers at the top of a hierarchy, then eventually it will spit out gold. If anything, that can be problematic.
Yahoo, in its current large size, simply may not have the latitude to pivot to the degree required as a publicly traded company, since anything any CEO attempts will draw the ire of activist shareholders. Any major change becomes a large political endeavor.
Assuming either of them was actually given the mandate to do so by the board of directors, etc, I imagine they'd fire like 50-80% of the staff, get rid of anything that's not profitable, and produce one highly refined product at a time, something that hasn't been done well before.
Source: Am both a Jobs and Musk fanboy and have done an unhealthy amount of reading about their histories and decision-making. I particular like this video of Jobs at NeXT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNfRgSlhIW0
Did NEXT manage to execute the plan and sell 50k workstations in 1991?
So I'm guessing more like 20k.
"...it seems to me that, in general terms for Steve, he was so passionate about the goal and trying to invent something impossible that everyone had to be on this mission to Mars, and if you weren’t on the mission you didn’t need to be here. It was really a focused approach, so it wasn’t about me or you or hard feelings or anyone. It was about the thing and making the thing better."
Read more at: http://nextshark.com/doug-menuez-who-spent-3-years-with-stev...
I really doubt either Steve Jobs or Elon Musk could turn Yahoo around. With Jobs's Apple turnaround, he had the advantage of sharing (creating, really) Apple's cultural DNA; he didn't need to "turn around" a company, he needed to cut the fat and refocus it so it could do what it was doing a lot better. Elon Musk has never run a turnaround; his companies have certainly encountered difficulties, but it's easier to take a new organization with a strong mission and make it work than to take an old, sclerotic organization in a market that doesn't exist anymore and somehow make it relevant again.