It's really sad how wildly distorted executive compensation has gotten. The best phrase I heard was "entrepreneurial reward for managerial duty", and I fear it's become all-too-common. My eyes popped out of my head recently when I saw that Coca-Cola (yes, that same drink company that's done just fine for over a hundred years and whose organic growth rate <i>might</i> be 1% if they're lucky) was trying to give management $13 BILLION over the next four years. It's insanity. And when it's not simple pay, it's severance packages that give Fuck-You money to people whose performance provably dreadful. Leo Apotheker made $25 million on his way out the door from HP, after vaporizing over $6 billion in buying a fraudulent company and doing virtually no due diligence. It's madness, pure madness. Executive comp is a bubble, these people aren't worth anything near this much, but I have no idea when it will pop.
That video is painful to watch... I know there's clearly a bit of a language barrier, but this guy sounds like a complete dingus. Then again, he's the guy making a cool ~$60 mil a year so what does that suggest?<p>I wonder what a guy like that <i>actually</i> does on a day-to-day basis. I could see there being a huge amount of pressure and work to do, but maybe they just hand it off to their underlings secure in the thought that they have a fat severance package waiting for them if anything goes wrong.<p>How can you expect someone to give a damn when they have no skin in the game? So this guy did an apparently horrible job and made millions. How does that make sense? Wouldn't you only want him to make an obscene amount of money if he did a good job? It really is fascinating how massive companies like that work - I guess you can draw some similar conclusions as in politics.
If you're the COO, and most of your compensation is in stock or bonuses related to the stock price, and the stock nearly triples during your reign (15.92 to 41.07)... you're going to get a big payout.<p>I also don't really buy that firing him cost this much, since much of it seems to have been a sunk cost. That stock was going to vest eventually whether he was fired or not, it just vested faster because he was fired.
That has to be one of Marissa's most public mistakes yet. She was the one who pushed very hard for Yahoo to hire him. It's interesting that a few articles I read mention that he's really smart but not good with people. I've read that Marissa has the same characteristics, I wonder if that gave her a blind spot on this one?
I really feel for Jerry Yang. It seems like every Yahoo CEO and Board has been riding the coattails of his Alibaba investment while his name is left for the footnotes.
Honest question, could somebody please explain why a big corporation like Yahoo, doesn't have some kind of cliff and progresive compensation? It's the Article accurate?
An excellent case study for the Macleod Heirarchy. <a href="http://gapingvoid.com/2004/06/27/company-hierarchy/" rel="nofollow">http://gapingvoid.com/2004/06/27/company-hierarchy/</a>
I've been wondering: How's Marissa Meyer doing as CEO? I haven't heard much about Yahoo recently except that they acquired some companies in order to get talent in the mobile space. It's been about 1.75 years since she became CEO. Is that enough time for a non-Steve Jobs CEO to change the trajectory of a company?
Whoever hired him should pay the cost of this mis-judgement, at least partially.
All hires should be paid bonus _after_ you made contributions, before then you have your regular salary.
This is ridiculous.
I always assumed that hiring price included him bringing clients from Google. As that is usually what happens when you hire anyone from sales from your competitor...
This is a testament to how top management destroy shareholder value and an operating company in their own massive short term gains.<p>"I'll hire you for $50 million, then you hire me for $60 million, think how much value we just brought to the company."
Executives salaries are always a hot topic in certain countries, not to much in the US though. Swiss people got so upset there is an entire movement limiting the CEO salaries to something sane. <a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/11/15/swiss-outrage-over-executive-pay-sparks-a-movement-in-europe/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/11/15/swiss-outra...</a> I guess it would be good to put a cap on exec compensation, it is just simply unfair to other workers especially given the poor performance...
Yahoo seems to have a certain difficulty in making the best use of the people it works with. Flickr springs to mind. If they're firing him just because he gives sucky presentations - which seems to be the only guess the article has - then that's on them.