All told, de Castro will walk away with at least $88 million and as much as $109 million for his 15 months of work, according to an analysis of his pay package by the compensation research firm Equilar. (The exact amount depends on whether he receives his full performance award for 2013 and assumes that he wasn't fired for cause, like stealing from the company or lying on his résumé.)
Even by Silicon Valley standards, his pay was stratospheric. In fact, in 2012, he was the eighth-highest-paid executive in the region, making more money than his boss, Marissa Mayer, according to Equilar.
Which raises a question: What were Yahoo's board members thinking when they agreed to hire him in October 2012?
De Castro, who was hired away from Google, was hardly a tech superstar. He had a spotty track record at the search giant. And less than a year before he left, he had been demoted from managing media and platforms to an amorphous role working on "special projects" on a team of one. Although he was promoted back into a bigger role several months later before jumping ship for Yahoo, it was not an auspicious sign for someone who was going to help turn around Yahoo.
A spokesman for Maynard Webb, the chairman of Yahoo's board and head of its compensation committee, referred questions about the board's actions to Yahoo. A Yahoo spokeswoman said the company had no further comment on de Castro, whose last day was Thursday. De Castro did not respond to phone and email messages earlier this week.
Charles M. Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, said the decisions about which executives to hire and how much to pay were typically made by the chief executive.
"The board can't tell the CEO who to hire," he said. "What it comes down to is, Do you have confidence in the CEO's ability to lead?"
In the case of Yahoo, the board was in turmoil after its previous chief executive, Scott Thompson, had been forced to resign amid pressure from big investors and a scandal over his resume. It saw Mayer as a technical and business whiz who could finally turn around the struggling company. So it was inclined to listen to her recommendation for a No. 2.
Elson said that boards had an obligation to ask hard questions, especially if the pay seemed out of whack. In his experience, Silicon Valley companies seem to do worse than most in such matters.
"Maybe there is something in Silicon Valley that believes it operates differently than in other parts of the world - the typical oversight doesn't apply to them because they are smarter than the rest of us," he said.
De Castro's pay package was extreme even by the Valley's standards. In 2012, his total compensation was $39.2 million, according to Equilar. That was higher than experienced tech chieftains like John Donahoe of eBay ($29.7 million), Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com ($22.1 million) and Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard ($15.4 million).
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