Trouble at Yahoo

Yahoo Puts the Final Nail in Marissa Mayer’s Coffin

The embattled C.E.O.’s severance package is only half of what Yahoo once promised.
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By Jason Alden/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

It’s the end of an era for Yahoo and Marissa Mayer. Following a controversial four-and-a-half-year stint as chief executive of Yahoo, during which the struggling Internet giant experienced two massive cyber-security breaches affecting more than 1 billion accounts, Mayer will step down when Yahoo closes its sale to Verizon, Yahoo announced in a regulatory filing on Monday. Altaba, the holding company that will be created to hold the remainder of Yahoo’s assets after the deal closes, will be taken over by Thomas McInerney, who was formerly the C.F.O. of Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp and has been on Yahoo’s board since April 2012. Ken Goldman will also step down when the sale closes—likely in the second quarter of 2017—and will be replaced by Yahoo’s global controller Alexi Wellman.

Mayer will receive a $23 million severance package upon her exit, just over half of the $44 million she could have received, according to an S.E.C. filing in September. Her severance includes $20 million in equity, $3 million in cash, and $25,000 in medical-coverage benefits. In order to receive her severance, according to the filing, Mayer must either be “terminated without cause” or otherwise terminate her employment with the company “for good reason.” Though she’d previously said she had planned to stay at Yahoo in some capacity after the Verizon sale closed, Yahoo said in January that Mayer would resign from the company’s board. It’s unclear what role Mayer will have after Yahoo sells its core businesses to Verizon.

In light of Yahoo disclosing a data breach impacting a billion Yahoo user accounts—considered to be the biggest hack ever—Verizon and Yahoo agreed to reduce Yahoo’s sale price from $4.8 billion to $4.48 billion in February, further marring Mayer’s tenure as the last in a long line of C.E.O.s who failed to turn Yahoo around. Earlier this month, Mayer, who is worth an estimated $430 million, agreed to forgo her 2016 cash bonus and a 2017 stock award, worth a combined $14 million, in the wake of the hacking scandal.