Yahoo CEO gets $47.2 Million salary package for 2009 | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo CEO gets $47.2 Million salary package for 2009

bloomberg.com

34 pointssandee35 comments

This is why a lot of otherwise bright people dedicate their lives to (getting an MBA and) climbing the corporate ladder at a large company. After a while you get huge payouts irrespective of any actual contribution. A few years at a Vice President role (leave alone CEO) can give you huge amounts of money.

Interestingly enough Terry Semel got a nice Golden Parachute too iirc after doing nothing much at Yahoo. One VP I know was asked to "teach Semel how the Internet worked" after Semel joined as CEO.

Yahoo also had 300 (!!) Vice Presidents at a point of time. Imagine the outflow of money to maintain that crowd. From Yahoo's latest marketing campaign

"There’s nothing to look at but a box and a button,” says the voice-over in the Yahoo (YHOO) marketing video–about an unnamed, but obvious, Web site. “When you look at this homepage nothing looks back at you. You come to this place so you can leave.” [1]

Somewhere in Yahoo there is whole bunch of marketing VPs and managers raking in millions of dollars for this!!

Yahoo's successive CEOs seem to take out a good chunk of its profits without adding much to the bottom line. Fwiw Sun was that way too.

[1] Source: http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100505/yahoo-tries-to-recover-f...

"getting an MBA and climbing the corporate ladder" - one would have thought in Tech companies Engineers would count for more than MBA's, but clearly that's not the case with Yahoo.

except Yahoo is not tech but media company

I don't disagree, but they have some smart and fun hackers at yahoo.

They used to. Yahoo! used to be a great company for an engineer to work for. Given what they have been doing lately, it seems the focus has changed from being a tech company to a media company. In fact, it all probably changed when Terry was brought in to run the company and he wanted to focus on digital media.

There's a lot of small intangible things that go in to making a huge successful company. The core employees "wanting" to work at the company (as compared to just collecting a paycheck) is one of the most imporant ones.

An engineer is the last person I'd want running a company like Yahoo! (and for many reasons). Hired-gun CEO's are expensive and don't always work, but the odds of success must be greater then hoping your brilliant founder/engineer works out as an executive. I would argue it's easier to educate an old CEO on tech than it is to teach an engineer how to be a successful exec.

See Slide, Yelp, Facebook...

"Engineers would count for more than MBA's" - i never said that an Engineer/Founder should be the CEO.

However, in a Tech company the contribution and therefore compensation of an Engineer would be expected to be higher than that of an MBA.

It depends. Ben horowitz wrote a blog post recently on why they prefer founding CEOs :

http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/

It's not just Yahoo. Companies that think of engineers as anything but replaceable "resources" are very much an exception to the norm.

@plinkplonk : i seem to have replied to your comment while you were in the process of updating it or did you edit it later.

I don't think Carol Bratz has a degree in MBA! atleast, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Bartz

Once you get into the CEOs club, it's plain sailing.

What I find hilarious is the turn of phrase on Yahoo's own version of this article.

"Carol Bartz received a $47.2 million compensation package during her first year on the job as the Internet company tried to motivate her to engineer a turnaround." Isn't doing a good job motivation enough (in addition to already substantial compensation at that level)?

Secondly, "Bartz generally impressed analysts by closing Yahoo's unprofitable services, laying off workers and saving even more money by striking an Internet search partnership with Microsoft Corp."

Wow, that required real creativity and lateral thinking. That kind of execution sure will help bring Yahoo up out of the morass. Where's the forward thinking?

Reading about the stereotypical American CEO, it seems to be all about layoffs and making the short-term bottom-line look good before bailing as the emperor is revealed to have no clothes due to lack of R&D or any thinking past milking of current cash cows.

At some point there's nothing left to cut from the hollow shell.

"At some point there's nothing left to cut from the hollow shell."

at which point the CEO sells the company and rides off into the sunset with all the millions from his stock options, or , worst case is let go with a multi million dollar parachute. e.g: Fiorina got 21 million $ when she was fired from HP, after essentially gutting it. [1]

With a bit of luck she'll be Senator and then she can apply her skills to governance!

[1] To compare, at 50,000 $/startup, one million dollars invested YC style would seed 20 startups.

(EDIT: corrected calculation, Thanks niyazpk/barrkel. That should teach me not to write quick comments while build/tests run)

20K * 50K = 1B

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million

Or to make it more dramatic, at 10,000 $/startup, one million dollars invested YC style would seed 100 startups.

Also IIRC YC tends to invest amounts that are nearer to 10K than 50K per startup.

Ok, Yahoo laid of 600 people last year and she gets 47 Million. How did that save money? I am not making fun. Serious question.

Both the $47M and the 600 people salaries were part of their budget. So she gets to save the 600 salaries. Plus whatever resources poured into projects those fired were working on.

Amusing. As far as I can tell, this is almost 10% of Yahoo's profits for last year (source: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=yhoo)

At least they turned a profit. That is better than turning a loss and still getting paid.

Isn't this slightly a reflection of her attitude towards the company she is steering? Could she have said "you know what, I'm already worth millions so this year I will only receive $1m and we'll use the rest of that money to help bring this company roaring back"....or are these execs just too far out of reality to realize that saving 40-something million dollars for their company would be helpful. I understand she was probably contractually aware of this salary, but c'mon!

That's a lot of money for making Yahoo more irrelevant.

Defiantly, imagine how many young talented engineers that have ended up at places like Google, Apple and facebook they could have got for that amount.

It's kind of like how myspace, just because there is this so called middle America that still loves yahoo today, doesn't mean that they will be there much longer if yahoo stands relatively still. Probably won't worry Bartz who can just jump off the sinking ship at some point with a massive amount of savings.

Given in 2008 MS was offering $33/share for Yahoo and it's currently trading at $16.47/share I'd suggest that Yahoo stockholders are used to losing out financially.

What everyone seems to be ignoring is that Yahoo was seriously damaged goods when she was hired to run it.

What do you think it takes to retain a CEO with a successful record (AutoCad) for a gig that's likely to be a failure and very possibly the last good job they'll get?

And i thought such things only happen in Large Banks. This is a sign of what is wrong with Executive Compensation across the board.

Carol Bartz is really good at shutting stuff down, doesn't even bother selling it.

Geocities, the publisher network, maven networks (only a year after they bought it for $160M) the list is long.

She's the worst CEO Yahoo! has had and instead of rewarding her they should throw her out and bring in someone with a vision on how to turn the tide.

If that doesn't happen yahoo will continue it's long and slow decomposition.

She joined in January '09, and since then the company has been on a steady slide down from the #1 visited website to now the #4 position. That's still huge, but it is clear that Yahoo! is coasting on momentum alone.

They gave her a large amount of stock so that she'd have a personal stake in making the company successful. It makes sense to have the people running the company personally intertwined with it. It's the same in startups, you don't want the founders shares to become so diluted that they no longer care about the company.

how about the people working for the company? Doesn't it make sense for them to have a personal stake? Some of them have been around at the company longer then they have been married.

At this pace, it'll take her only 396 years to catch up to the roughly $18.6B net worth of Larry Page.

The difference of course is that Larry Page has actually created value for Google.

Well, if she doesn't create a lot more value for Yahoo than her salary cost, her appointment will have been a failure and she'll have to leave.

In principle Yahoo could be turned around to be a growing and massively profitable company again though it's a very hard job.

At this pace, she will earn 10 or more times more in 1 year of doing nothing good - nothing stellar, for sure - for the company than most people earn in their lives.

$47.2 Million? yahooooo

Reply on news.ycombinator.com