Fired Yahoo exec receives massive $109 million payout

henrique

Henrique De Castro has been fired from Yahoo after only working there for fifteen months. It’s doubtful that he’s unhappy about being fired because he has received a payout of $109 million.

Castro, who was Yahoo’s Chief Operating Officer, was fired by CEO Marissa Mayer, and the fact that she hired him in the first place is seen by some as her first major mistake. “[Henrique] is very smart, but he has a difficult personality; both his teams and his clients dislike him … He has no experience whatsoever running any kind of a real ad salesforce, let alone a 1,000+ team selling experiential media into brand buyers,” said one of Business Insider’s sources.

Still $109 million is still a ridiculously large payout. As Jeff Bercovici puts it in his Forbes article, that’s “about $244,000 for every day he worked for the internet giant”. The payout is being called one of the biggest that the industry has ever seen, and is especially relevant because most of the higher payouts that we’ve seen have been for CEOs.

Mayer herself didn’t try to shrink away from the mistake. “During my own reflection, I made the difficult decision that our COO, Henrique de Castro, should leave the company,” she said.

Hopefully now she will be able to find a COO who has a better understanding of the way Yahoo’s advertising works. Because, as much as many of us prefer Google over Yahoo, competition benefits us regular ole people.

[via Forbes, Business Insider, image via nrkbeta’s flickr]

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