The Yahoo board is currently searching to find a replacement so that current CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang can step down and assume the role of chief strategist, according to FinancialWeek.
Potential candidates for the job: former AOL chief Jon Miller, NewsCorp president and COO Peter Chernin, former eBay boss Meg Whitman, andone-time Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig, according to FW. Top-runner Susan Decker, Yahoo’s former CFO and current president, currently serves on the boards of Costco, Berkshire Hathaway, and Intel.
Yang will leave amid shareholder criticism for walking away from an offer by Microsoft to buy Yahoo earlier this year. Microsoft was one of a few possible deals that fell through during the past year. Other suitors included search-engine competitor Google and Time Warner, which reportedly wanted to merge Yahoo with AOL.
Yang has been in talks with the board, including billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn, about his departure. He was in talks before Google pulled out of the search deal in early November.
“Jerry was miscast in this CEO role as far as running Yahoo at this point,” Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst at Wunderlich Securities, told Reuters. “He’s much better off running strategy or technology behind the scenes.”