Microsoft retains Yahoo employees with 1.5 billion US dollars, 110 thousand for each person

According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo! is preparing to take out a $1.5 billion package in order to retain its employees, which averages out to about $110,000 per person.

Based on court documents from a consolidated shareholders lawsuit, on March 24th this year, lawyers for Yahoo! and two Detroit-based pension funds held a telephone conference during which one Yahoo! lawyer pointed out that Microsoft had already informed them that they "were prepared to take out a $1.5 billion retention package for Yahoo! employees."

After laying off around 1000 people at the start of February this year, Yahoo! now has approximately 13,200 employees, which would work out to each receiving $113,700 from Microsoft.

In fact, Yahoo! employees aren't the happiest ones: when Tellme Networks was acquired by Microsoft, their employees were offered as much as $300,000 each in retention packages. Although the company only had 330 employees, Microsoft still paid out $100 million.

If Yahoo! continued to lay off employees, those remaining would receive even more on average - though Yahoo!'s lawyers have stated that "there are no plans to conduct further layoffs in the future."