Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer sure knows how to get a rise out of investors.
Shareholders were fuming Friday over the news that Mayer is looking to spend some of Yahoo!’s proceeds from the sale of its stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba on messaging startup Snapchat.
The potential investment — part of a fund-raising round that would value Snapchat at $10 billion — adds to the scrutiny of Mayer’s strategy of pursuing acquisitions, including a $1 billion deal for Tumblr, that have done little to boost revenue or profit.
Last week, activist hedge fund Starboard Value sent a stern letter to Mayer, calling for Yahoo! to pursue a tie-up with AOL, among other steps for boosting shareholder value.
To placate investors, Mayer has promised to return to shareholders at least half of the company’s $9.4 billion of proceeds from Alibaba’s windfall initial public offering last month.
That still won’t be enough to satisfy everyone.
Some shareholders have reached out to Yahoo! in recent weeks to demand that 100 percent of the proceeds be returned to investors, The Post has learned.
“Investors are pissed off,” Eric Jackson, a Yahoo! shareholder and manager of Ironfire Capital, said of the Snapchat investment first reported by WSJ.com.
An investment in Snapchat “continues this perception that Yahoo! investors are from Mars and Marissa is from Venus,” Jackson said.
“If shareholders wanted to invest in different speculative investments, they could do it themselves,” another Yahoo! investor told The Post.
A spokeswoman for Yahoo! didn’t return a request for comment.
Yahoo!’s stock, which jumped 4.4 percent on Starboard’s letter, initially traded lower on news of the Snapchat investment before closing up 1.3 percent, to $41.03.