Oath Chief Tim Armstrong Bagged $70 Million During Verizon Stint

(Bloomberg) -- Tim Armstrong, former chief executive officer of AOL Inc., collected at least $70 million in the years after orchestrating the ill-fated sale of his company to Verizon Communications Inc.

Verizon disclosed Armstrong’s haul, which consists of equity, severance and other compensation, in filings on Monday, just months after it took a $4.6 billion writedown that reflected nearly half the value of its AOL and Yahoo acquisitions. Soon after, the company rebranded its digital media unit Verizon Media Group, killing the Oath moniker it had given to online assets including AOL.

The Wall Street Journal reported Armstrong’s pay details on Tuesday.

Armstrong, 48, who stepped down to take an advisory role in October, left the company at the end of December. He joined Verizon in 2015 with the acquisition of AOL. Verizon later bought Yahoo and set out to transform its online operations into an advertising power that could compete with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc., with Armstrong at the helm.

The effort made little headway against the two Silicon Valley giants. Armstrong stepped down from his position as CEO of Oath two months after Hans Vestberg was tapped to lead Verizon in August. Guru Gowrappan, who had been chief operating officer of Oath, took over the digital media business.

In January, Verizon cut 800 employees, or about 7 percent of the media division’s staff.

As part of the acquisition, Armstrong received a so-called founders award of restricted stock. He also collected millions of dollars in salary, bonus and equity awards during his three years at Verizon, and received $6.3 million in severance when he left.

To contact the reporters on this story: Scott Moritz in New York at smoritz6@bloomberg.net;Anders Melin in New York at amelin3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Nick Turner at nturner7@bloomberg.net, John J. Edwards III, Pierre Paulden

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