In the cold light of history, executive pay in this epoch is going to shock.
Executive 'severance' shall not be comprehended at all.
Something is very, very, very wrong in our culture.
Executive 'severance' shall not be comprehended at all.
Something is very, very, very wrong in our culture.
Add to that the fact that Yahoo had a recent serial history of hiring then firing CEOs before they brought in Mayer, and the pool of potential people to fill the spot shrinks again.
Yahoo had no pathway to success and was likely to fail spectacularly - especially given the way the board was behaving - which signified to any potential hire that it might be their last job. The pool of potential CEOs shrinks again.
Of course the incoming CEO would negotiate a well-beyond-market severance package. They shouldn't even want to hire someone who didn't have the foresight to do so.
Sprawling, disjoint, unfocused, patchwork... these descriptions comes to mind, and they apply as much to Google, whose rise and slip from clarity of purpose and mission is eerily similar in contour to those of us who remember when Yahoo was All That.
This bubble's obsession with unicorns is a fine example of an emergent system marshaling unbelievably vast resources in the service of perversely petty and frivolous aims.
You're acting like they just hired Paris Hilton off the street, when the reality is that she busted her ass her entire career in a field that few women have had major success in.
The last CEO to hold onto the job at Yahoo as long as Mayer has is Terry Semel, and he got booted in 2007.
There's nepotism all over silicon valley, but there's also a strong respect for brains and the ability to get things done.
If you want your kids to have a better life than you did, a free market capitalist economy is where you want to be. If you want to maintain your family's position of power and wealth, you want to be somewhere else.
Executive pay is what it is because the system is very, very broken.
The manners in which it has been systemically broken and remains broken through the collusion of the infinitesimally small number of people occupying the roles of winner are well documented, indeed, they are trivial to enumerate.
I'll say it again. In the future, that we let these systems degrade to this point will be viewed with horror, and the same sort of moral incomprehension that we now claim to hold with respect to slavery and every other human failing.
I hope my children see the day. If they don't it's because things have continued to slide in the other direction, which means things are going to live in a nightmare.
What you are suggesting is a system that over and over again has proven to create poverty and destroy innovation.