Yahoo CEO Mayer’s 2014 pay package jumps 69%
$ 42.1million based principally on stock and option awards
SUNNYVALE — Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer shot up in the ranks of well- paid chief executives last year, according to a regulatory filing Wednesday, becoming what some analysts believe to be the highest- paid woman running a U. S. company.
But her $ 42.1 million income, a 69 percent rise over the previous year, was also something of a fluke, stemming from onetime incentives awarded when she joined the company in 2012.
“Yahoo didn’t decide to pay more” in 2014 than in 2013, said Aaron Boyd, director of governance research at Redwood City- based Equilar. “The way the rules are set up, she wasn’t technically given the grant until 2014.”
Part of her original recruitment package was designed to make up for the Google stock she gave up when she left the search engine giant to take Yahoo’s helm, but the value of the original award has ballooned with help from Yahoo’s stake in Chinese e- commerce company Alibaba, which went public in the fall.
Mayer has made $ 103.7 million since she took over the struggling Sunnyvale tech pioneer in summer 2012.
Her annual $ 1 million salary was supplemented last year by $ 41 million in other compensation, most of it stock and option awards, according to the proxy statement Yahoo filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday ahead of the company’s shareholder meeting in June.
Among the other contenders for highest- paid Silicon Valley woman is Safra Catz, who was promoted in November from Oracle’s chief financial officer to one of the two CEOs replacing founder Larry Ellison. Katz’s 2014 pay will not be publicly disclosed until next month.
Angela Ahrendts, a former Burberry chief executive who joined Apple last year as its head of retail and online sales, made $ 73 million in her first year at the Cupertino company.
Despite grumblings from activist shareholders such as Starboard Value about Yahoo’s inability under Mayer’s nearly three- year tenure to revive its core business, Mayer was able to avoid a proxy fight this year when no investors filed proposals for a leadership change. Marissa Mayer’s pay came from incentives when she left Google for Yahoo in 2012.