A startup called Owler, which is sort of like a cross between Glassdoor, Pitchbook, Alexa and your favorite news feed, has released a survey that names the 50 most liked CEOs of public US companies.
Tech CEOs dominated the list, landing 22 of the of the 50 spots.
Even so, tech CEOs really weren’t all that well liked. Not a one landed in the top 10 on the list, and five of them landed on the second list of the study: the least liked CEOs, per its likability index, which ranks a CEO on a scale from 1-100.
And the lowest scoring tech CEO of all: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. There was only one CEO that scored worse: United’s Oscar Munoz.
Mayer was once hailed as the savior of the aging but venerable internet site Yahoo, which, in its heyday (long before Mayer joined), was worth more than $100 billion. She led the company for about four years and was paid handsomely during that time, by some estimates more than $162 million in salary and stock awards.
But she began to get a reputation for being a perfectionist, micro-manager type of boss who alienated some people. And under her watch, Yahoo had more layoffs and a couple of major security breaches, including one particularly massive password security breach that impacted 1 billion user accounts.
Ultimately, Mayer couldn’t save Yahoo and sold its key internet business to Verizon’s AOL unit for $4.8 billion in a deal that’s expected to close soon, possibly in June. As Business Insider previously reported, the new company will be called Oath and Mayer will not be joining it.
Before she leaves, Mayer has left Yahoo employees with a parting gift, a provision called a “double trigger” that was baked into the AOL acquisition deal and covers all employees. The provision means that if AOL immediately lays them off, they’ll immediately get to cash out of years worth of stock and, in some cases, be eligible for cash payments.
Mayer is joined on the 10 least likeable list by other tech CEOs, HP’s Dion Weisler (the PC/printer division of the former Hewlett Packard); Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Meg Whitman (the rest of the former Hewlett-Packard); T-Mobile’s John J. Legere; and Sprint’s Marcelo Claure,
It’s worth noting that being not-s0-likable isn’t the same thing as being unlikable. And it’s not a score card on the CEO’s business performance. Owler fully admits that “likable” is a squishy term. The point of this list of the bottom 10 is simply to allow CEOs and companies to get a feel for how their top brass is generally being perceived.
Owler says it has 1 million active users and those people have rated over 167,000 CEOs around the world. Unlike Glassdoor, which is limited to employees, Owler allows all sorts of people to weigh in on all sorts of companies including employees, followers, competitors, business partners and so on.
It says it factored in the person’s relationship to the company, and factored out multiple submissions by the same individual, to come up with this list of the most liked CEOs.
Here’s the full list of the 10 least likeable CEOs, according to Owler.
- Johnson Controls Alex Molinaroli: 44.6 points/100
- HP’s Dion Weisler 43.9
- American Airlines’s Doug Parker, 43.8
- HPE’s Meg Whitman 43.7
- Southwest Airlines’ Gary  Kelly 43.7
- Walmart’s Doug McMillon 42.8
- Office Depot’s Roland Smith 42.7
- T-Mobile’s John Legere, 41.9
- Sprint’s Marcelo Claure, 32.8
- Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, 32.8
- United Airlines’ Oscar Munoz, 21.5
Courtesy Businessinsider
