Will Yahoo's CEO be able to weather the company's turmoil?
Amid reports that Yahoo is exploring a sale, many are wondering if CEO Marissa Mayer will be able to weather the turmoil and keep her job.
"I do not see that at all. I hate to say it, but I don't see how she survives this," CBS News financial contributor Mellody Hobson said Tuesday on "CBS This Morning."
On Friday, Yahoo, the company where eight CEOs have gone through its revolving doors since 2001, said its board hired economic advisers and "formed an independent committee to conduct a process to evaluate strategic alternatives." According to Hobson, the exclusion of Mayer from the committee is a "bad sign."
"A loss of confidence. A loss of faith, maybe, that they don't think she can be objective," Hobson said.
Hobson, president of Ariel Investments, said she spoke to leaders in Silicon Valley on Monday and received two explanations.
"The first was, [Yahoo] was a lost cause to start. One person said to me they were offered the CEO role and said, 'I'm not taking it. Because you can't fix this company,'" Hobson said. "She's just another in a series of CEOs who've tried to turn around this company for the last eight years. The second answer was that she had a very unique experience at Google where she built her career and she tried to apply what she did and learned at Google at Yahoo. Google is once in a lifetime company, and it just doesn't translate."
Part of the reason Yahoo has "lost its way," Hobson said is because the company "has no identity."
"So we think Facebook, we think social network. We think Google, we think search. We think Instagram, we think pictures. We think Yahoo, we think a mishmash," she explained. "We don't really know what it stands for anymore. Its competition came in with their laser focus and just ate their lunch."
Yet the company still has a vast installed customer base -- 600 million monthly users on mobile and 225 million users of Yahoo Mail.
Hobson said either private equity firms or telecommunication companies like Verizon or AT&T could buy Yahoo.