As Yahoo is handed over to Verizon in a major merger that is set to close soon, Marissa Mayer's career with the company is expected to come to a close. If everything goes as planned, Mayer is entitled to a huge stock payout currently worth around $186 million. This is on top of $219 million she's already received during the five years she has been working as the company's CEO, leaving her with a grand total of around $405 million.
Yahoo paid a lot to get Mayer on the team in 2012. She had come from a high-level executive position at Google, where she had worked since the early days of the company. Yahoo gave her a $30 million signing bonus plus $14 million in compensation for the bonuses she was forgoing by leaving Google. Yahoo expected that Mayer's experience would allow her to turn around the company after years of sinking sales and bad management. As soon as she was brought onto the team, the stock soared as investors hoped for the best.
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Mayer sought out numerous shifts in the way the company was managed. She raised pay and adding benefits, streamlined the focus to better keep up with digital advertising techniques, and bought numerous tech companies including the $1 billion-dollar purchase of Tumblr. But nearly every one of her moves turned out to be a failure. Tumblr didn't pan out as a money maker, many high-profile executives left, and even their new focus on mobile, video and native advertising didn't pan out well.
Last year, Yahoo began to see signs of the pending sale. The board was able to change the company's bylaws to make it easier for Mayer and the other executives to receive the big payday. Even though selling Yahoo will mean the end of Mayer's tenure, she and her fellow executives will be sitting on hundreds of millions they earned while failing to make much of a difference.
