Semel Upset By Media Critics

At an “all-hands” meeting at Yahoo, CEO Terry Semel decried the shots being taken at his leadership at the company as coming from critics who are “full of sh*t.”

It’s tough being an executive at a publicly traded company that is seriously underperforming its most significant rival in the marketplace. Everyone from the Wall Street Journal on down has an opinion about the top C-level executive’s capabilities, and precious few of them are very positive.

A transcription of the end of Semel’s rally-the-troops bromide appeared on a Yahoo 360 site called StraussBlog. The blogger there cautions that he’s “breaking a ton of rules” by posting the verbatim transcript, a notion that simply isn’t credible because the post hasn’t been pulled.

It probably stands as much chance of being pulled as Nancy Pelosi saying “no thanks” to the Speaker of the House position in January.

So let’s take a look at what Semel has earned versus what he’s delivered in the past couple of years since the search engine he chose not to purchase for a billion dollars, Google, erupted through the stratosphere and hasn’t looked back.

In 2005, Forbes tells us that among all CEOs, Semel topped them all in compensation with $230.6 million. That’s dollars, not yen or pesos. The median compensation for software & services CEOs was under $8 million in 2005.

From December 31, 2004 to December 30, 2005, Yahoo’s stock price increased under Semel’s leadership by $1.93 per share, a 5.18 percent increase. The majority of that rise began with the start of the holiday season, where Yahoo’s share price was $33.52 on October 14, 2005.

Of course, the December 31, 2004 price was $37.68, and Yahoo’s shares essentially stayed flat between then and October 14.

Not so for Semel’s compensation, which reached that $230.6 million mark by leaping $204.5 million from his prior year’s compensation, according to proxy statements from the company.

No that’s not a typo. 2004 compensation – about $26 million. Add $204.5 million to that. For those keeping score at home, it’s more than a 5.18 percent increase.

Yet it’s the Journal and Valleywag and TechCrunch and everyone else with their slings and arrows who are full of sh*t for daring to criticize Semel’s tenure.

That assessment just doesn’t pass the smell test. Sh*t.

—
Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark Murdok:

David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.