Stocks only went up because of Alibaba, Marissa didn't have anything to do with the price of the stock.
EDIT: Haters out in force I see. The share price was $16 when she started. It's now $48. It's irrelevant what she did or didn't do to get that. That's the fact, and that's what matters to her employers, the shareholders.
Why shouldn't she be compensated for a 200% increase? The company's long term survival is a goal that may have never been shared by the actual owners.
Here's one of many Matt Levine pieces that explained the Yahoo/Alibaba situation, although it's now dated: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-01-28/yahoo-wou...
Just because she resorted to something other than organically growing the business to increase the value to her shareholders doesn't mean she's a failure. We're all assuming that her job was to "save" Yahoo. I don't think that was ever really on the table.
> she resorted to something other than organically growing the business to increase the value to her shareholders
Parent comment:
> and such stock was acquired before she became CEO
She didn't do "resort to" anything. Yahoo made that money from an action a previous CEO was ultimately responsible for. If you want to be really generous, you could praise her for not selling the stock—but if we're praising CEOs for every way they choose not to change the companies they come into, then my pet rock would make an awesome CEO indeed.
You have to give her credit where it's due: she saved the Alibaba partnership from that total fuckup, Carol Bartz. CB was such a fuckup, that she's the sun to Marissa's candle. She insulted Jack Ma in front of his underlings when he came calling to Sunnyvale. She refused/forgot to put someone on BABA's board and totally ignored Ma. As a result, Ma said 'fuck you' and took Alipay out of the group without even telling Bartz.
I wish more people looked at the period preceding Marissa (Bartz, Thompson) and they'd realize that Mayer was a Godsend compared to the cabal of clowns running Yahoo before her.
Her job, presumably, as the CEO was to convince all of the enterprise's employees and customers that Yahoo would be sticking around for the long run. At the same time, she had to prepare to wind down the business while returning capital to the shareholders. I would call that a difficult job.
My lesson from this is most companies with excess capital should make investments, not acquisitions. Most certainly a company with a long string of failed acquisitions should. Yahoo has been repeatedly given as an example, but others like Google don't have a particularly great record either. Berkshire Hathaway is a great example of a massive business centrally owned by a very barebones team (in Omaha.)
By allowing those shares to accrue and not doing anything stupid at the wheel, she did her job. Whether or not it's fair or worth her comp, is irrelevant.
The shareholders valued her work at a set amount and that's what she was paid.
Unless you're taking an economic stance on the issue, wherein you believe shareholders are messing up future incentives and economic prosperity by recognizing and rewarding CEO's that do the bare minimum of "just don't fuck it up," or something similar, this debate is impractical.
I hadn't been following Yahoo that closely, but was vaguely curious about the whole Alibaba angle, thanks for linking that article
Haters out in force I see. The share price was $16 when she started. It's now $48. It's irrelevant what she did or didn't do to get that.
The goal of a resurgent Yahoo seems to only have been one shared by outside observers.
When does this ever end