The Hewlett-Packard board has fired Carly Fiorina. Check out the stock price
graph:
Figure from Yahoo Finance
Right after the 2 PM announcement, the stock price jumped up 10% and settled down to close up 6.9% by the end of the day. Now, HP's market capitalization is $65 billion. In other words, the market thinks that Carly Fiorina was destroying about $5 billion in shareholder value just by being CEO. It's not often you get that clear an idea of how the world feels about you. Not a bad result for the HP board either. Fiorina's severance package is $21 million. There aren't many decisions you can make that increase your valuation by a factor of 200 over what you paid. That's a pretty good ROI.
Credit: Kevin Dick pointed out the cost/benefit ratio on the severance package.
Perhaps we should start using 'Carly' to refer to anyone who's a net negative to the project they work on. Imagine the stock gains if Greg Stein got kicked off Apache or Brendan Eich got kicked off Mozilla!