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Comment by CodeSheikh | Hacker News Reader

This is unacceptable. She sold off a big chunk of Yahoo (that she could not resurrect) to Verizon where most of the staff is eventually going to get axed and she walks off with $122 Million. There has to be checks and balances somewhere. Tech industry is turning into dirty Wall Street.

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You've miss the actual story. Activist investors (Starboard) forced her to sell. She had no desire to sell. The payout was set up to make a sale less appealing to the board. They also set up change in control provisions for the entire company, so any employer who gets canned as a result of the deal has immediate vesting of all invested stock. This will be as high as $1B in cost for Verizon if they fire everyone. Again, incentives against a deal.

Not defending her, but the tech industry isn't turning into something, it's been this way for decades as well. Just because Yahoo! was part of the new wave of 90s and on tech companies, the big ones still end up managed by the same types (and perhaps the same people) as the old tech firms.

To expect better or different behavior is naive. Expect corporations (particularly publicly traded ones) to behave in ways which frequently benefit the heads, and often hurts the laborers.

Well, if you're a Yahoo shareholder, you could have voted against the deal.

If you're not, it's not your money, so why would you accept it or not?

I wonder how strong the connection is between lightly managed retirement funds and poor corporate governance. Pretty much anybody with retirement savings is a likely partial owner of Yahoo (via some broad market index fund), but those funds tend to be managed in a way that they do what the relatively insular boards recommend.

So there is a legitimate question to be answered about poor corporate governance when you tell people that they need to invest their money in stocks to ensure their comfort in later life.

"when you tell people that they need to invest their money in stocks to ensure their comfort in later life"

They don't have to, they could buy bonds if they feel uneasy with the risks associated with stocks.

Have you seen the stock? Wallstreet should be grateful.

The problem is that is all due to the Alibaba stake.

http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-value-almost-entirely-t...

???

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