Yahoo! announced on Monday that Marissa Mayer will step down as CEO when Verizon’s acquisition of the company is completed. A regulatory filing points out that Mayer will receive a severance package in the region of $23 million.
Current CFO Ken Goldman will also step aside once the sale closes. The company also announced its new CEO for the post-Verizon deal. Thomas J. McInerney, the former CFO of IAC, will assume the position, while Alexi Wellman will replace Goldman.
Yahoo! had already confirmed that Marissa Mayer would step down from the board after the sale. None of these announcements are surprising. The former Google executive is known to have been against the decision to sell to Verizon.
Verizon announced last July its decision to buy Yahoo!. The telecommunications giant initially offered $4.83 billion. The purchase involves the company’s 1 billion users and advertising business. However, it does not include Yahoo’s cash, shares in Alibaba Group Holdings, its shares in Yahoo! Japan, and non-core patents.
The largest carrier in the United States later lowered the amount it will pay for Yahoo! by $350 million due to security breaches. Indeed, the online company announced the biggest cybersecurity breaches in history.
Yahoo! says two hacks from a state actor combined to cause the breach. The attack resulted in the largest security exposure in history. Unfortunately for Yahoo!, this is an unwanted title the company has already been holding since a similar attack announced in September that saw 500 million user accounts hacked.
The company has earlier denied such a breach, but after it was revealed there was a danger Verizon would pull out of the acquisition.
Uphill Battle for Marissa Mayer
Once among the biggest names on the internet, Yahoo! rode the website wave to the very top. However, as users switched from the all-in-one service that Yahoo! and Microsoft MSN offered, the company struggled.
Dedicated news, sports, social, and other sites ate into Yahoo’s user base, even though the company still has hundreds of millions of users. Marissa Mayer has been CEO since 2012 and has helmed the company through its steady decline, as well as its most testing episodes, such as the security breaches.
