Marissa Mayer is eating your lunch

[It's her party: Top Google executive Marissa Mayer]

Mayer, 32, is Google's vice president of search products and user experience, an unwieldy title that means she's the executive finding even more ways to run circles around newspaper publishers. And she's getting awfully rich in the process.

Mayer's pay isn't high enough to require its disclosure by Google. But she's employee No. 20, meaning she accumulated a big stake in the search-engine giant before it went public in 2004 -- turning those early employees into gazillionaires. Consider the fact that top Google attorney David Drummond didn't join the company until about four years after Mayer. Yet, he controls nearly 152,000 Google shares, the last shareholders proxy report says, worth $71.3 million at current prices. I'll bet Mayer's stake is way north of that.

For gossip websites like Valleywag, San Francisco magazine reports in its new issue, "Mayer is an easy mark, a machine-like Google executive and (so they say) a social climber who paid $60,000 to win lunch with Oscar de la Renta, once dated Google co-founder Larry Page, and uses her looks for publicity." (Meow!)

I've posted about Mayer as one of the new generation of ultra-wealthy technology executives, living in San Francisco and roiling the news industry; watch my first (and, so far, only!) installment of Gannett Blog TV, featuring Mayer, here. The newspaper that's perhaps suffered the most as a result of surging tech companies: the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle, run by publisher and former Gannett executive Frank Vega. He just hired long-time Gannett editor Ward Bushee (left) as the Chronicle's top newsroom guy.

[Photo: Mayer at last year's San Francisco Museum of Modern Art charity ball, by Drew Altizer Photography]