In mid-September, New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway said that being pregnant with twins saved Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer from being fired for poor performance. With a $42 million compensation package in 2014, he called her the most overpaid CEO in history.
Now that she has given birth but continues to fail to turnaround Yahoo, talks are again rife that she should be replaced, although Mayer had insisted that she needs more time to turnaround the company that pioneered email services in the 1990s.
However, while waiting for her to succeed, Yahoo shares had dipped almost 35 percent since January, causing a lot of shareholders to ask analysts if Mayer should be given the boot and who should replace her. In a report to clients on Monday morning, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analyst Robert Peck listed several possible replacements to save Yahoo from further financial disaster under Mayer's helm.
Shareholders have noted that while Mayer is hanging on, other Yahoo executives have jumped ship before the Yahoo boat sinks. Among those who have left the company are its chief development officer, SVP of marketing partnerships, chief marketing officer and chief information security officer, noted CNN.
Peck talked to a lot of industry stakeholders on what would the next Yahoo CEO needs to bring into the job if the Yahoo board fires Mayer. His top five are Scout Media CEO Ross Levinsohn, Chegg CEO Dan Rosenweig, CBS digital unit CEO Jim Lanzone, 1stdibs CEO David Rosenblatt and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
He picks Levinsohn and Rosenweig as the best candidates because the former served as interim CEO of Yahoo, while the latter was its COO. If Yahoo would want someone with a fresh perspective, he points to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and another Google executive who runs the tech giant's ad sales and North America and Latin America operations. Mayer was pirated from Google in 2012.