Marissa Mayer has millions of reasons to celebrate her job at Yahoo. The CEO's future may be in question, but she's already earned over $100 million in reported compensation from the search giant over the past four years at the helm. (And that doesn't include the $55 million she's due if she steps down.)
But is "earned" the right word? Verizon's purchase of Yahoo offers a good opportunity to see how Mayer's tenure as CEO compared on a pay-for-performance basis to past Yahoo chiefs.
Generally speaking, Yahoo CEOs have a median reported compensation of $36 million per year, going all the way back to 1997, and that was Mayer's 2015 reported compensation, which ranked her at No. 11 among U.S. CEOs, according to Equilar.
The relationship between reported pay and performance at Yahoo has been tenuous at best, with a (very) small statistical correlation, with an "R-squared" measure of 0.0063 (where zero is no correlation, and one is perfect correlation.)