CEO Gets Rich on Sale of Yahoo to Verizon

While Yahoo has a market capitalization of close to $37 billion, the vast majority of the value of its stock stems from its holdings of Alibaba, the Chinese Internet retailer and Yahoo Japan, which is a separate publicly traded company. Essentially the company that Mayer controlled is the one that got sold to Verizon for $4.8 billion. If Yahoo shareholders could have expected a return of 7.0 percent a year on their shares (the long‐term average for stock), the money paid out to Mayer was a bit less than 10 percent of their expected earnings. That’s a lot of money for Yahoo shareholders to be giving away to a single person.