Marissa Mayer wants her annual bonus distributed to Yahoo's employees after the company lost hundreds of millions of dollars from two mishandled security breaches.
The Yahoo CEO is trying to salvage a bad situation, asking the company's board to distribute her bonus from last year, which could be as high as $2 million, to Yahoo's employees, according to The Associated Press. Mayer also agreed to forgo her annual stock award.
This comes after Mayer and Yahoo's top lawyer were under fire for mishandling security breaches that exposed personal information from more than 1 billion of the company's users, costing Yahoo a reported $350 million.
Yahoo's board didn't say if it would follow through with Mayer's request to distribute her bonus to Yahoo's entire workforce of 8,500 employees, AP technology writer Michael Liedtke reported.
"Losing her bonus and annual stock award probably won't be too painful for Mayer, who is already rich after working for more than a decade as a top executive at Google and then as Yahoo's CEO for the past 4 1/2 years," Liedtke wrote. "She is also in line for a $44 million severance package if she doesn't go to work for Verizon after the sale closes."
If Mayer's request is accepted, Yahoo employees would receive about $235 apiece, Recode's Kara Swisher reported.
Mayer's forfeited stock award is estimated at up to $12 million, according to Swisher.
"When I learned in September 2016 that a large number of our user database files had been stolen, I worked with the team to disclose the incident to users, regulators, and government agencies," Mayer wrote in a note that was published on Tumblr. "However, I am the CEO of the company and since this incident happened during my tenure, I have agreed to forgo my annual bonus and my annual equity grant this year and have expressed my desire that my bonus be redistributed to our company’s hardworking employees, who contributed so much to Yahoo’s success in 2016."
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