A New York University marketing professor said during an appearance on “Bloomberg Surveillance” on Wednesday morning that if Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer hadn’t announced her second pregnancy, she would be out of a job within six months.
“I think Marissa Mayer is the most overpaid CEO in history right now,” Scott Galloway said, adding she’s made some of the “worst acquisitions in the history of tech.”
Galloway teaches graduate students at NYU.
“I don’t think any board in America that’s as visible as Yahoo wants to be seen as not leaning in,” Galloway said. “She got a reprieve from death row because she’s pregnant with twins. I realize how awful that sounds, but she’s going to go down as the most overpaid CEO in history.”
Watch his comments, from Bloomberg, below:
On the bright side, she has a future role as a failed Republican Senate candidate, to be followed with a run for a (vice) presidential slot!
Yahoo has been a mess for a very long time. Their model died nearly 10 years ago, and they have been drifting ever since, vacillating between presenting themselves as “adapting” and “being a prime take over target”.
While I am not sure her second pregnancy has that much to do with it, she is going to be another example of a woman finally let into the board room only to find the company disintegrating around her, so she can take the blame.
What, spending more than a billion dollars for a site with people’s collections of porn gifs wasn’t genius business acumen?
I dunno, man. I can’t profess to have detailed knowledge about it, but his comments are referring to specific decisions she has made as being bad decisions, not just vague references to “oh look, the ship is sinking, blame whoever happens to be the captain.”
That said, he’s certainly struck a nerve by being so offensive, but I have to admit to there being some vague merit to what he says: can you imagine the total pubic relations shit show if the Board axed her while pregnant with twins? In this political climate while such issues are getting uber-attention and have been rubbed raw to the bone? It would certainly be a factor the Board would consider.
Anyhoo, we don’t have any idea why they keep her or whether they even consider her decisions to be poorly made, as he does, so he’s clearly totally off base and just yammering crass nonsense.
She has made some bad decisions, but when you take over the helm of the Titanic after its already hit the iceberg, it really hard to point out that if she had done this or that, the ship would have stayed afloat for another 5 minutes.
And you are correct. Firing her now would not go over well in Silicon Valley, which is already prickly about gender discrimination. (part of the reason she was brought on board as CEO in the first place). Of course, this is her second pregnancy while being in that position. So waiting for a window of her not being with child is problematic too.
And yeah, he is yammering crass nonsense. Yahoo is full of actual business issues for a business professor to be discussing, this one is pretty trivial in the scheme of things.