Moderna CEO is given a PAY RISE of 50% after he cashed in $400m in stock
Moderna’s CEO has received a 50 percent pay raise after cashing in $400 million in stock – despite the company facing backlash for raising its COVID-19 shot from $26 to $130.
Stephane Bancel, 50, received an earnings raise of about 50 percent last year, bringing it to $1.5 million. His target cash bonus was also increased, according to the Washington Post.
Bancel’s shares also rose nearly $2 billion, despite owning about $3 billion to begin with. He said he will donate the share sale to charity. His target share yielded 67 percent in 2021.
The CEO’s heavier pockets come as the company faces massive backlash for quintupling the cost of their jab, taking it from $26 to $130. The shot is estimated to cost just $1.18 to make, equating to a 10,000 percent markup.
Senator Bernie Sanders recently blamed the company for the price hike, saying, “In today’s pharmaceutical industry, we’re dealing with an unprecedented level of corporate greed, and that’s certainly true of Moderna.”
Stephane Bancel, 50, received an earnings raise of about 50 percent last year, bringing it to $1.5 million. His target cash bonus was also increased
Bancel’s shares also rose nearly $2 billion, despite owning about $3 billion to begin with. He said he will donate the share sale to charity. His target share yielded 67 percent in 2021
The company — which made an estimated $39 billion in profit last year — benefited from a multibillion-dollar taxpayer-funded support package to design and test its COVID-19 shot as part of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. -government.
Bancel told DailyMail.com in January, “It is [the price] going up a little bit because the previous price was hugely discounted…we got help from the US government.
“When we signed the first contract with the US, we made them an offer [with] a hefty discount.’
He added, “In the US it’s now $26. That was the discounted price, it’s going up. Pfizer said they’re going to price it between $110 and $130.
“We’d like to be the same ballpark as that.”
Pfizer was heavily criticized when it announced plans in October to raise the price of its shot to $130 later this year.
Moderna had previously considered raising the commercial price to between $82 and $100 per dose.
The CEO’s heavier pockets come as the company faces massive backlash for quintupling the cost of their jab, taking it from $26 to $130. The shot is estimated to cost just $1.18 to make, equating to a 10,000 percent markup.
Covid vaccines were free to Americans during the pandemic, regardless of their insurance status.
The pandemic has made Bancel billionaires, as well as two co-founders of its board of directors, and the company argues that Bancel’s raise was “appropriate in light of the increased magnitude of the increasingly global responsibility for Moderna’s executives,” according to the Washington Post.
In addition to his hefty salary, Moderna spent about $1 million on security, according to the Post, as he experiences an “elevated threat level” from being hooked up to the COVID-19 vaccine.
The company struck gold during the pandemic, boosting their profit margins by 300 percent, bringing in a whopping $18.5 million by 2021.
Moderna’s board is also one of only five where three directors have more than $1 billion in stock.
Despite the company’s profit margins poised to rise due to the more expensive dose, Bancel, who joined Moderna as CEO in 2011, claimed he took a pay cut at the time to join the pharmaceutical technology company.
“I took a risk with an untested medical technology when the failure rate in the pharmaceutical industry was around 90 percent,” he wrote in March 2023.
The CEO currently lives in a $6 million home in Boston, where the company is based
Two years into his tenure, he received $4.5 million in stock to exercise at 99 cents each. By 2021, his few million worth of shares had risen to an estimated value of about $1 billion, according to the Post.
“Moderna has provided my family with financial security that I could never have imagined or, frankly, never sought,” he said in 2022.
He donated the sales profit — $176 million — to charity and donated another $76 million this year.
Moderna largely pays its executives in shares they earn over time, which has led to criticism.
Glass Lewis, a shareholder advisory firm, criticized Moderna for inflating Bancel’s salary without linking it to performance targets.
However, the company argued that the executives are only rewarded if the shareholders are too. When his stock fell 29 percent in March, Bancel reportedly only received $302 million, while when the stock rose nearly 150 percent the year before, his compensation package was worth about $800 million, according to the Post.