Marissa Mayer will step down from her post as Yahoo CEO after the company’s $4.48 billion deal to be acquired by Verizon closes later this year.
According to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission released Monday, Mayer will receive a $23 million Gold Parachute severance package that includes about $20 million in equity and $3 million in cash. Also stepping down when the deal closes, likely in the second quarter of the year, will be co-founder David Filo, CFO Ken Goldman, Chief Revenue Officer Lisa Utzschneider and General Counsel Ronald S. Bell.
Thomas J. McInerney, former CFO of Barry Diller-owned IAC, will become CEO of the company after the Verizon deal closes. Once that happens, Yahoo will change its name to Altbaba and become an investment company with stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan.
It is unclear what Mayer’s next move will be. When the deal was announced, she wrote in a blog post that she planned to stay with the company. Earlier this year, Yahoo said in a regulatory filing that Mayer would step down from the company’s board of directors.
Verizon announced last year its plans to acquire Yahoo for $4.83 billion. Verizon wants to combine Yahoo with AOL, which it acquired for in 2015 for $4.4 billion, and get access to Yahoo’s global audience of more than 1 billion users, including more than 600 million mobile users, as a way to increase its mobile advertising presence.
But a pair of big hacks, disclosed in September and December of last year, took some of the shine off the deal. They were enough to drop the price by approximately $350 million.
[Note: The price being paid by Verizon for Yahoo has been corrected since publication.]
