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...