Mayer to Get Close to $60 Million (And Maybe More) in Overall Compensation for Yahoo’s Top Job 
 
 Yahoo revealed in a regulatory filing that it could be paying its new CEO Marissa Mayer a total of close to $60 million to turn the company around. 
 
 The mega-sum includes salary, equity grants, stock options, a make-whole payment for the Google shares she left behind and, perhaps most remarkably, a $30 million one-time retention award. 
 
 The amount, which is a whole lot more than what the last two Yahoo CEOs — Carol Bartz and Scott Thompson — were paid is, um, rather large. 
 
 One Yahoo board member had characterized the pay package to me as “big, big bucks,” as I reported earlier today. 
 
 I would say so! 
 
 (Side note: Mayer is already extraordinarily wealthy from her stint at Google, where she was its 20th employee.) 
 
 Here’s the breakdown of the largely performance-based compensation: 
 
 The salary amount is typical at $1 million, with an annual bonus of up to 200 percent of the base salary, which is $2 million. But, according to Yahoo’s employment letter, she could also get up to a 400 percent bonus, dependent on exceeding targets, which is $4 million. 
 
 Mayer also gets an equity award for 2012 of $12 million in stock ($6 million) and options ($6 million) that vests over three years. (She could get another similar grant annually, but I did not include that in the overall number, which is $12 million annually or more if she exceeds targets.) 
 
 The really big number is a huge up-front, one-time retention award, vesting over five years, of $15 million in stock and $15 million in options. 
 
 Finally, there is a make-whole payment of $14 million for the stock she left behind at Google. 
 
 Overall, that means about $5.4 million for the rest of this year and could add up to $20 million each year to come. 
 
 The pay package was hotly debated by the board as to whether the high-profile exec was worth the huge amount. 
 
 While Mayer is considered a talented techie, a very strong decision maker and adept at product innovation, some of the board’s directors raised concerns about her and paying so much to retain her. 
 
 One issue: She had been notably passed over by Google CEO Larry Page for one of the major unit jobs in his reorganization of the company, while others in her peer group had been promoted. 
 
 That said, since such company ups and downs happen all the time, others argued that Mayer was just the kind of disruptive agent of change that Yahoo needs, especially because she could inspire its engineers and also attract much needed talent. 
 
 The enormous compensation was pushed through, said several sources, by Dan Loeb, the one-time activist shareholder who now appears to be the puppet master of the Yahoo board. He owns about six percent of the Silicon Valley Internet giant. 
 
 (Another side note: Multiple sources tell me that Loeb has been making calls to all kinds of Internet figures this week, looking for high-fives for his landing of Mayer, a hiring that was largely engineered by him.) 
 
 Her appointment has surely garnered a lot of attention for Yahoo, with massive media coverage of the dynamic young exec. Some of the coverage has focused on her being a woman and also on the fact that she is currently pregnant. 
 
 But much of it is focused on how Yahoo — a deeply troubled company that has been trying to revive itself for many years now without success and with a lot of management mishegas — has been able to attract such a high-profile and impressive-resumed leader to goose both its products and its stock. 
 
 Let’s hope Mayer can do just that, because Yahoo is surely paying up big-time for the privilege. 
 
 Please take a gander here at the filing, directly from the Department of the Internet Rich Get Richer: 
 
 YHOO-20120719-8K-20120715 
 
 
 
 Please see this disclosure related to me and Google. ||||| Even after Yahoo goes through with the sale of its core business, it will still pay its top executives handsomely—and in some cases, even better than it did before. 
 
 In announcing a plan for the company’s future Monday, Yahoo (yhoo) said it had picked a new CEO to replace Marissa Mayer once its deal with Verizon (vz) officially closes. Yahoo is selling its technology and advertising business to Verizon, and the remaining company will consist only of the hoard of Alibaba (baba) stock that Yahoo owns, its stake in Yahoo Japan, and a miscellaneous array of smaller investments. 
 
 Running the leftover stump of Yahoo is likely to be a much simpler and easier job than the one Mayer had, from which she is walking away with a $23 million severance package. Add to that the $69 million worth of unexercised stock options awarded to Mayer, plus the $97 million of Yahoo stock she already owns (which she’ll be free to sell when she leaves the company), and Mayer’s net worth is set to increase by about $189 million. (That’s even after she voluntarily gave up about $20 million of her annual stock bonus this year after taking fire for the cyber attacks Yahoo recently suffered. It’s also significantly more than Fortune’s estimate two months ago of $141 million for Mayer’s total payday, thanks to new equity grants and stock price appreciation in the meantime.) 
 
 But Mayer’s replacement, Thomas McInerney, seems in many ways to be getting an even sweeter deal. McInerney, the former chief executive of IAC (iac) (the Internet media company once known as InterActiveCorp, which owns dating sites including Match.com (mtch)), will get a starting base salary of $2 million to become Yahoo’s new CEO, according to the offer letter made public Monday. That’s double the $1 million base salary that Mayer currently takes home. 
 
 What’s more, Yahoo actually expects to pay McInerney $4 million in his first year working at the company, assuming he earns his target bonus, which is equal to his base salary, according to the new disclosures. That’s 25% more than the $3 million the company is paying Mayer for a salary and cash bonus this year. On top of that, McInerney will also be eligible for grants of long-term incentive rewards of up to $24 million, depending on achievement of performance goals. If he were to receive the maximum amount, it would also be twice as much as Mayer’s long-term incentive grant in 2015, the last full year before the Verizon deal was announced. 
 
 Setting aside any discussion of the gender wage gap, McInerney’s compensation is all the more remarkable when you take into account his job responsibilities following the Verizon deal. While Mayer was hired to tackle the herculean challenge of turning around Yahoo’s struggling media business—a seemingly impossible task, in hindsight, at which she ultimately failed—McInerney will collect a paycheck for what may practically be a no-show job. 
 
 After all, the company that McInerney will run will not be an operating business like the one Yahoo is today, but rather an investment company not all that different from a mutual fund. In fact, Yahoo has already begun referring to the future version of itself, which will be renamed Altaba, as simply “the Fund.” Yet unlike most funds, the Yahoo/Altaba incarnation (which will still trade like a stock under the ticker symbol “AABA”), will not buy any new stocks, and it “does not intend to sell” the Alibaba stock or Yahoo Japan shares it already owns, according to the disclosure. 
 
 In short, McInerney is getting paid a huge amount to sit atop a fund that basically runs itself. The way Yahoo describes McInerney’s responsibilities in a filing Monday makes it sound like he will be little more than a glorified trustee, the way a retiree might occasionally check in on the status of the family nest egg. The Altaba fund will “depend” upon the executive team “for the monitoring of the Fund’s investments,” according to Yahoo’s disclosure, but it’s unclear how much of a time commitment that “monitoring” will require. One portion of the fund—the part consisting of marketable debt securities, which may require more active management—won’t even be managed in-house, but outsourced to a third-party investment advisor, Yahoo said. 
 
 A spokesperson for Yahoo declined to comment, but a source close to the company says that besides usual fund management responsibilities, McInerney will be charged with untangling Altaba “out of a long and significant tail of Yahoo operating company liabilities,” from class action lawsuits over the data breaches to “ongoing dialogues with regulators.” 
 
 The Altaba fund will oversee assets currently valued at more than $60 billion, including more than $40 billion worth of Alibaba stock. By comparison, BlackRock (blk), which oversees more than $5 trillion in assets—most of which are also in passive funds, not actively managed—paid its CEO Larry Fink a base salary of $900,000 in 2015, less than half of McInerney’s starting salary, and total compensation of $26 million for the year. Bill McNabb, CEO of passive fund giant Vanguard, which has some $3.8 trillion in assets (but is not a publicly traded company), received $10 million to $15 million in 2015 compensation, according to Bloomberg. 
 
 Besides managing—or even just monitoring—far more assets than Altaba will, BlackRock and Vanguard also have another distinguishing factor: They are complex businesses with their own products and operations spread across the world. Ultimately, BlackRock and Vanguard’s executives are accountable for their own companies’ performance. McInerney, on the other hand, may very well be paid as though he were responsible for Altaba’s performance. But ultimately he won’t be: That will depend almost entirely on Yahoo Japan and Alibaba, on whose coattails McInerney will be riding. 
 
 Clarification: A previous version of this article referred to McInerney’s long-term incentive rewards as stock grants. While such compensation is typically awarded in some form of stock that vests over time, Altaba has yet to establish what form these rewards will take. This article has been updated accordingly.
– She may have an almost impossible task ahead of her at Yahoo, but at least Marissa Mayer will be well paid for her efforts. Very well paid. Kara Swisher of All Things D reports that Yahoo could end up shelling out at least $60 million over five years, more than the company paid its previous bosses. Mayer's annual salary is a par-for-the course $1 million, but then come the extras. "The big number is a huge one-time retention award, vesting over five years, of $15 million in stock and $15 million in options," writes Swisher. But even $60 million might be undershooting it. The Wall Street Journal says Mayer will get $100 million over five years—if the company hits all its performance targets.