Henrique De Castro has been pushed out of Yahoo on a plank lined with RSUs. The chief operating officer, whom insiders described as a "dead man walking," is leaving with a $20 million stock bonus after working at the company for a little more than a year.

A regulatory filing shows that De Castro also earned $39.2 million in 2012, in the form of cash and stock after he joined the company, which made his compensation higher than Mayer's. De Castro had been Google's vice president of Google's partner business solutions worldwide and was brought to Yahoo to "help revive growth at a Web company beset by sagging sales."

As Kara Swisher wrote last week, remarking on De Castro's absence as CES:

That pressure to perform in the ad space has caused a lot of tension inside Yahoo, said a multitude of sources, especially between Mayer and COO Henrique De Castro. Sources present at a number of meetings both attended said the relationship had become less cordial than previously and that Mayer has begun to significantly insert herself in content and media efforts.

Mayer brought De Castro over from Google, where she was also an exec, last year, with the hope that he would be able to turbocharge the struggling ad business at Yahoo. Despite a giant paycheck she gave him and a lot of internal rejiggering, that has not happened as yet, and it has caused the persistent rumors of his departure to surface periodically inside and outside the company.

The reason he's being thrown overboard now, Swisher explained today, is:

Because Yahoo is set to announce its quarterly results later this month and most expect them to continue to lag the Internet industry badly once again. A person close to the Yahoo board had told me a week ago that De Castro's fate would be settled before that report came out.

The exec with the prickly personality and Mayer, who is well known for playing favorites sounds like a bad corporate romance. But it looks like De Castro made a killing in the divorce.

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