In her three years as head of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer has made a lot of people extremely rich. Start with Dan Loeb, the hedge fund manager who spied an opportunity in the lumbering tech giant and began buying its shares and agitating for change in 2011. He led a campaign to force out Scott Thompson, then chief executive, and brought in Ms Mayer, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest executives. By 2013, when Mr Loeb’s Third Point sold its position, the fund had netted $1bn.

Then there is David Karp, who sold his blogging platform, Tumblr, to Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1bn. Mr Karp, who was 27 at the time, owned 25 per cent of the company, so made a cool $275m. Nick D’Aloisio was just 17 when Yahoo bought his news-reading app, Summly, for $30m. He recently left the company to focus on his degree at Oxford.

Shareholders who bought Yahoo the day before Ms Mayer became chief executive and held on to it have seen the value of their shares more than double, despite a recent fall. If you had held the S&P 500, you would have earned a mere 55 per cent return over the same period. If you had owned Apple, you would have a made a comparably measly 35 per cent return.

Any other chief executive might be celebrated for that kind of performance. Not Ms Mayer. Early on it was all Vogue photo shoots and praise for one of the few women to scale the peaks of the tech industry. Then she was attacked for insisting employees no longer work from home. Now she is under attack for all the confusion surrounding Yahoo’s strategy — primarily its plans to spin off its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese ecommerce start-up — and her own pay.

She walked into the job from Google, having amassed an estimated $300m in her brief career. In 2013 her Yahoo pay including stock awards and options was $24.9m, and in 2014 it reached $42m, mostly thanks to Yahoo’s then rising share price. All quite normal for companies of Yahoo’s size.

The question is what exactly she did to earn it. For all of her dizzying plate-spinning, buying, selling and hiring, it is not clear that Ms Mayer has done much to improve Yahoo. It remains tucked in behind Google, Facebook and YouTube as one of the most visited websites in the world. But rather like AOL, it is considered a service stuck in internet dark ages. It is what grandma uses to look up the weather. It is not for Snapchatting teenagers. And it is not what investors crave most of all: the prospect of growth.

Fortunately, Yahoo has been the beneficiary of an extraordinary investment made by Jerry Yang, founder and former chief executive. In 2005 he bought a $1bn stake in Alibaba — a stake now worth $31bn. But now Yahoo and its investors are like a family bickering over the corpse of a wealthy relative. What to do with this windfall? The US tax authorities are refusing to make it simple; so, instead of trying to enhance Yahoo’s products to catch up with Facebook and Google, Ms Mayer is spending her time figuring out what kind of legal and corporate contortions will realise the best return for the Alibaba stake and clear the air around the core business.

For engineers such as Ms Mayer, simplicity is highly coveted. And Yahoo is anything but simple. It remains a blur of services and assets of wildly different value. It is hard to get a handle on exactly what it has. Those 1bn monthly active users — are they right ones? That $5bn of revenue — is it growing? For the right management team, there is plenty of cash to acquire and invest.

We need to get over Ms Mayer’s pay cheque. She has been paid for taking the job in the first place. Those options grants were the Smarties required to hire her. Mr Loeb and Yahoo’s other investors have been more than handsomely rewarded by her decision to join the company and fire up the stock. What she now deserves is a chance to operate its core internet businesses, and the sooner the better. Only then can we hope to tell whether she is worth it.