Why Yahoo's Slump Isn't Erasing Marissa Mayer's Stock Options
- Options granted in 2014 had strike price set 15 months earlier
- The instruments are still worth $14 million after stock slide
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When Salesforce.com Inc. founder Marc Benioff said last week that Marissa Mayer had a “great pay package,” it may have been an understatement.
Shares of her company, Yahoo! Inc., are down more than 10 percent since February 2014, but her stock options granted at that time are still in the money. That’s because the strike price on the options, the biggest portion of her $42.1 million package that year, was set 15 months earlier when she was just four months into her job as chief executive officer and the stock was lower, according to Yahoo’s proxy. The options are part of multiyear retention and performance packages that repeatedly use that early stock price.