Yahoo Names CEO Marissa Mayer’s Replacement; His Base Salary Doubles Hers

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer will be replaced when the firm is sold to Verizon, and what remains becomes an investment company called Altaba.

Board member Thomas McInerney, 52, a former executive with internet firm InterActiveCorp and Ticketmaster, will take her place, Yahoo said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday.

Mayer will receive a golden parachute of $23,011,325, according to a proxy statement Yahoo filed on Monday. It was not immediately clear why that figure was lower than the $55 million Yahoo specified in an earlier proxy statement.

On March 1, Yahoo announced that because of the data breaches, its board had stripped Mayer of her $2 million annual bonus for 2016; and she had forfeited her 2017 annual equity grant of at least $12 million in restricted stock and stock options.

McInerney is to receive $2 million in annual base salary, double Mayer’s base pay. He’ll also be eligible for a performance-based annual incentive award of another $2 million, plus “long-term deferred compensation” in the form of a grant of up to $24 million after the sale closes, the Monday SEC filing said.

Yahoo and Verizon have said that the sale — which had been threatened by revelations of two record-setting hacks of Yahoo users’ personal data — will close between April and June. Yahoo was forced to cut the price by $350 million in the wake of the security breach announcements.

After the sale, Yahoo will become Altaba, managing assets in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, along with some non-core patents not included in the Verizon sale.

Whether Mayer will have any future role in Verizon or Altaba is unclear. According to a SEC filing, she will not sit on the Altaba board.

Other executives named Monday for Altaba’s leadership were Arthur Chong, 63, as chief counsel and secretary, with a $1 million base salary; Alexi Wellman, 46, as chief financial and accounting officer, with a $500,000 base salary; and DeAnn Work, 47, as chief compliance officer, with a $400,000 base salary.