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Illustration by Mike Nudelman/Photo by Fortune Live Media On the morning of Thursday, July 12, 2012, Yahoo's interim CEO, Ross Levinsohn, still believed he was going to be named permanent CEO of the company. The room was big, with a large horseshoe table and video screens on the walls. The agenda for the meeting: Levinsohn was going to brief the directors on his plan for Yahoo, should he be named permanent CEO. There was Jim Heckman, Levinsohn's top dealmaker, who'd spent months negotiating a huge deal with Microsoft. There was Shashi Seth, Yahoo's top product management executive, already planning a long-needed update to Yahoo Mail and the Yahoo home page. There was chief financial officer Tim Morse, who'd just completed a critical, company-saving deal to sell a portion of Yahoo subsidiary Alibaba. veteran whom Levinsohn had hired to run Yahoo's media business. And there was Mollie Spillman, whom he'd just made CMO Heckman, Seth, Morse, Rosen, Spillman, and handful of others sat off to the side. Ross Levinsohn and Marissa Mayer Ross Levinsohn All of them believed that the meeting was a formality -- that Levinsohn was going to get the job. For the two months prior, the chairman of Yahoo's board, Fred Amoroso, had made it clear that he was going to do everything he could to make sure Levinsohn and his team would be running the company for the foreseeable future. He told Yahoo employees this during an all-hands meeting in May He'd even joined a sales call to express support for Levinsohn to Yahoo advertisers -- an oddly hands-on move for a chairman. In June, Amoroso helped Levinsohn recruit a high-profile Google executive named Michael Barrett into Yahoo. During the recruiting process, Amoroso promised Barrett that Levinsohn's "interim" title was only temporary -- that it was safe to leave Google. Levinsohn had another reason to be hopeful: For the past few months, he'd been speaking with two of Yahoo's most important new directors, Dan Loeb and Michael Wolf, almost every day. As important as it was for Levinsohn to have Amoroso's support, he needed Loeb's more. Loeb ran a hedge fund called Third Point, which owned more than 5 percent of Yahoo and had, only months before, forced the resignation of Yahoo's previous CEO. Wolf, a former president of MTV, was consulting for Third Point on media investments when Loeb asked him to join the Yahoo board and lead its search committee for a new CEO. It was going to be a doozy, as he planned to seriously alter the direction of Yahoo. He wanted it to stop competing with technology businesses like Google and Microsoft and focus entirely on competing with media and content businesses like Disney, Time Warner, and News Corporation. As part of this transition, Levinsohn wanted to spin off, sell, or shut down several Yahoo business units. He said doing so would reduce Yahoo's head count by as many as 10,000 employees, and increase its earnings before taxes and interest by as much as 50 percent. In fact, Levinsohn announced during his presentation that he and his team had already started down this road. Levinsohn told the board that, under his direction, Heckman had begun negotiating a deal with Microsoft to exchange Yahoo's search business for Microsoft's portal, MSNcom, and large payments in cash. Levinsohn and Heckman had also been talking with Google executive Henrique De Castro about turning over some of Yahoo's advertising inventory. There was also talk of unloading some of Yahoo's enterprise-facing advertising-technology businesses into a joint venture involving New York-based ad tech startup AppNexus. Dan Loeb Heidi Gutman/CNBC Dan Loeb controlled 5 percent of Yahoo and joined the board after a bloody proxy fight. It was during this part of his presentation that Levinsohn began to feel the permanent Yahoo CEO job slipping away. Wolf, the man in charge of the committee tasked with hiring a permanent CEO, began to question the wisdom of the deal. Wolf asked, in a loud voice with a sharp tone, "I understand why this is good for Microsoft, but why is it good for Yahoo?" Harry Wilson, another director brought onto the board by Loeb, joined Wolf in his criticism of the deal as "short-sighted." Their cross-examination of the deal eventually boiled down to one question: Had Levinsohn and Heckman made any irreversible commitments to either Microsoft or Google? It was obvious to several people in the room that Wolf and Wilson wanted to make sure another candidate for the CEO job would not be forced to follow through on a deal they had not negotiated. But Wilson and Wolf's loud complaints about the Microsoft deal weren't the worst sign for Levinsohn's chances; Loeb is the suited, slick, and handsome Wall Street type. He wears his salt-and-pepper hair short and messy on purpose. He's actually from Southern California, and sometimes he puts off a surfer vibe. As the interim CEO talked, Loeb stood at the back of the room and played with his BlackBerry. One person in the room remembers watching Loeb texting for a while and then, "during the most important part of the presentation," getting up and going to the bathroom for 10 minutes. After the meeting, Barrett, the Google executive Amoroso had helped Levinsohn poach, called Levinsohn to ask how it went. Levinsohn told him he no longer felt like he was getting the job. That night, Levinsohn flew to Sun Valley, Idaho, where investment bank Allen & Co. holds an annual retreat for big-name media and technology executives. Over the weekend, Levinsohn played a guessing game with venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Square CEO Jack Dorsey, and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. With each of them, Levinsohn and the other Silicon Valley bigwigs ran through a long list of names, trying to figure out who might be getting the job Levinsohn had so hoped for. For each name they came up with, they came up with a persuasive reason why that person could not be it. Finally, late Sunday night, Levinsohn got a call from a friend of his at Google. This person asked: Had Levinsohn heard that Marissa Mayer had interviewed for the Yahoo job the Wednesday prior? On Monday, July 16, four days after Levinsohn's last board meeting, Yahoo made it official: Thirty-seven-year-old Marissa Mayer was Yahoo's new CEO. The board had indeed already made Mayer an offer by the time Levinsohn went into that final meeting to present his plan for Yahoo. After the news broke in public, Levinsohn admitted to friends that he was disappointed. He had really wanted the job, and believed he would have done very well with it. He also felt bad for the team he put in place, who would now have to report to an unfamiliar leader. If he had to lose out to someone, at least he lost out to an icon.
Flickr/Fortune Live Media Marissa Mayer There is no one else in the world like Marissa Mayer. Now 38 years old, she is a wife, a mother, an engineer, and the CEO of a 30-billion-dollar company. In a world where corporations are expected to serve shareholders before anyone else, she is obsessed with putting the customer experience first. Worth at least $300 million, she isn't afraid to show off her wealth. Steve Jobs may have lived in a small, suburban home with an apple tree out front, but Marissa Mayer lives in the penthouse of San Francisco's Four Seasons Hotel. While rival CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Larry Page of Google wear flip-flops, hoodies, and T-shirts, Mayer wears Oscar de la Renta on the red carpet. Mayer calls herself a geek, but she doesn't look the part. With her blonde hair, blue eyes, and glamorous style, she has Hollywood-actress good looks. Young, powerful, rich, and brilliant, Mayer is a role model for millions of women. And yet, unlike Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, Mayer resists calling herself a feminist. She even infuriated working mothers across the world when she banned Yahoo employees from working from home. Widely admired by the public at large, Mayer has many enemies within her industry. They say she is robotic, stuck up, and absurd in her obsession with detail. They say her obsession with the user experience masks a disdain for the money-making side of the technology...
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