In her three years as head of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer has made a lot of people extremely rich. Start with Dan Loeb, the hedge fund manager who spied an opportunity in the lumbering tech giant and began buying its shares and agitating for change in 2011. He led a campaign to force out Scott Thompson, then chief executive, and brought in Ms Mayer, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest executives. By 2013, when Mr Loeb’s Third Point sold its position, the fund had netted $1bn.
Then there is David Karp, who sold his blogging platform, Tumblr, to Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1bn. Mr Karp, who was 27 at the time, owned 25 per cent of the company, so made a cool $275m. Nick D’Aloisio was just 17 when Yahoo bought his news-reading app, Summly, for $30m. He recently left the company to focus on his degree at Oxford.
Shareholders who bought Yahoo the day before Ms Mayer became chief executive and held on to it have seen the value of their shares more than double, despite a recent fall. If you had held the S&P 500, you would have earned a mere 55 per cent return over the same period. If you had owned Apple, you would have a made a comparably measly 35 per cent return.