She isn't that good at all and never have been. WSJ and Barron's complained about her for the longest time possible now.. There are very critical articles of her in serious business press and magazines. Sexism is bad. But granting free pass to every bad CEO when she is a woman just because of her sex isn't smart. These people are CEOs, getting paid millions, destroying businesses and sometimes lives. It is important to keep them to the same scrutiny regardless of their sex.

Firing bottom performers every quarter. Banning remote work. Spending $7m on fashion show she attended with friends.

If this was a man he would have basically no right to criticize any other business especially successful one like Google. She looks absolutely ridicilous in this position. It's like F-grade student giving lectures to straight A's student. Do these people have shame at all?

And examples like this, or even worse like infamous Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, should remind us that we shouldn't give free pass to CEOs just because they are women. CEOs have the highest rate of sociopaths, no matter the gender.

She pissed off most of the staff. She introduced a weird iteration of "fire the bottom performers every year". She bailed out Dan Loeb (who had hired her but changed his mind after she refused to do almost anything she promised). She didn't get a particularly good price in the eventual sale. She got paid hundreds of millions for nothing (her pay alone was ~5% of the eventual sale price...one person). Terrible acquisitions. Terrible hires. She also appears to have rubbed almost everyone she met up the wrong way (I know people who met her and got a bad impression, imo she came across very poorly to investors and was preoccupied with perception/spin...I believe she gave an interview a few years ago in which she even blamed Carl Ichan...truly odd).

Most people are, I think, quite forgiving when it comes to failing in these situations. The issue often is that some people, most in my experience, have no idea how to behave when things go wrong (and, given enough time, something will always go wrong).

OK, then why didn't Yahoo just hire me to run the company? Same outcome but my salary would have been MUCH lower :)

In all seriousness, just because Yahoo was in a downspin doesn't mean that leadership can't save the company. Look at John Chen and Blackberry

Ehh, Yahoo had to gamble big on Marissa. They lost I guess, but it was the correct decision at the time. I think people are forgetting the terrible CEOs prior to that, and the horrible decision not to sell to Microsoft.

Remember the Obama style "Hope" posters with her face on them?

>Yahoo was already dying when she joined.

She joined it.... that is something she decided to do.

I wonder what Yahoo would look like now if Jerry had accepted the Microsoft acquisition. Yahoo was already in troubled waters at the time, in hindsight it looks like a missed opportunity.

>Tumblr wasn't a bad acquisition.

I would like to see your justification for this. Because Yahoo paid 1.1 billion dollars for it and they wrote down pretty much all of the value within a few years. It looks especially bad when compared with Facebook buying Instagram around the same time for about the same price.

They seemed to be more than capable of that prior to Mayer turning up.

Folks probably perceive that because she was a high profile CEO that ran her company into the ground. Yes Yahoo! was not doing great before her but if you get paid tens of millions of dollars to do a job I would say it’s not unfair to be judged unsuccessful when you fail. She’s still rich after all. Do we also need to unquestionably agree she is excellent?

Also she killed remote work at Yahoo! and practiced great hypocrisy by simultaneously building a private daycare for her kids next to her office.

She is no hero and it’s ok to point that out.

> despite her successes

Only going by what I've read she was never extremely successful at Google, only hired early and managed to stay, but never incredibly impactful. Honest question because I likely only know half the story what are her real successes at Google?

Let's just call a spade a spade. She was put in place by activist investors who wanted to make a quick buck on the significant Alibaba stake that was held by Yahoo. The goal was never to save Yahoo.

Said activists made a good return and sold their stake, and Mayer pretty much ran the company in the ground while being compensated well for it. Nothing wrong with that in a capitalist world, however, that's all it is.

Anyone with half a brain could have done that, myself included.