It will also conclude the remarkable five-year run of Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, who was paid nearly a quarter of a billion<br />dollars — a generous sum even by Silicon Valley’s lofty standards — while presiding over the company’s continued decline.<br />She initially received restricted stock worth $35 million<br />and stock options worth $21 million, based on 2012 stock prices for Yahoo, along with a cash salary and bonus.<br />The surging value of those investments — not any brilliant business moves by Ms. Mayer — is why Yahoo’s shares went up.<br />By Wall Street’s most basic yardstick — Yahoo’s stock price — Ms. Mayer earned every penny she got.<br />After the $4.5 billion sale to Verizon, shareholders will still own an investment company<br />with $57 billion of stock in two Asian internet companies, Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan.<br />Ms. Mayer, who oversaw search at Google, also assigned more than 1,000 people to Yahoo’s search products,<br />which it had largely abandoned in 2009 when it sold its search operations to Microsoft.<br />“Was the return based on what she did?”<br />Still, managing those investments was a key reason that Yahoo’s board hired Ms. Mayer.<br />“Over the last five years, Yahoo shareholders couldn’t have done a lot better than this.”<br />She was essentially hired by one hedge-fund manager, Daniel S. Loeb, who got her predecessor fired and won three seats on Yahoo’s board in 2012.<br />To lure Ms. Mayer from Google and compensate her for options she forfeited there, Yahoo’s board offered her a lucrative employment agreement.
