The CEO of pharmaceutical giant Moderna earned a staggering $18 million salary in 2021 alone, according to reports.
Moderna is a biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
It was founded in 2010 and develops medicines based on mRNA technology.
Stéphane Bancel was hired as CEO of Moderna in 2011.
Bancel was previously a top executive at pharmaceutical behemoth Eli Lilly and Company and CEO of French biotech company bioMérieux before joining Moderna.
In 2011, Moderna went public and raised more than $600 million at its initial public offering.
The funding made it the biggest biotechnology IPO at the time.
Despite being established several years, Moderna only brought its first product to market in December 2020, when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave emergency use authorization to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Moderna sold 807 million doses of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine, reported to be worth $17.7 billion.
The Covid shots account for virtually all of the company’s revenue.
In 2021, Moderna’s total revenue was a whopping $18.5 billion.
The figure is a major increase from 2020’s total revenue of $803 million.
Moderna has projected sales of $19 billion for 2022 based on vaccine purchase agreements with governments across the world.
Aside from the multimillion-dollar salary, Moderna could potentially reward its 49-year-old CEO with a huge golden parachute worth nearly $1 billion.
Moderna is providing Bancel with an exit package of $926 million if he is terminated or dismissed because the company is sold or a merger happens.
“The value of Bancel’s so-called change-in-control package has varied as a bulk of it, $922.5 million, is in the biotech company’s stock, which has swung widely over the course of the pandemic along with the company’s progress in making a vaccine to fight it,” CNBC reported.
“Bancel’s exit package also includes a cash severance payment of $1.5 million and a bonus of $2.5 million if the company is sold and he’s terminated.”
The value of Bancel’s golden parachute was revealed on Wednesday in Moderna’s annual proxy report.
Bancel made $18.2 million in cash, stock, and options in 2021– an increase from $12.9 million compensation in 2020, and more than double his $8.9 million compensation of 2019, according to Barron’s.
Moderna also spent an additional $661,000 in personal security for Bancel and his family.
Stéphane Bancel has a net worth of $4.6 billion, according to Forbes.
A CNN report from May revealed: “Covid-19 vaccines have created at least nine new billionaires after shares in companies producing the shots soared.”
The list of the new COVID-19 vaccine billionaires includes Bancel, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin, senior executives from China’s CanSino Biologics, and early investors in Moderna.
READ MORE – Moderna CEO Claims 4th COVID-19 Shot Will Be Needed by Fall
