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Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees
- seydor 3y ago> Bancel's haul was largely from pre-planned stock sales,
- xyzzy_plugh 3y agoI recently encountered a situation: "My husband and I are both managers in tech and each make $600k a year" First, good for them, I guess, but also people constantly conflate stock-based compensation (which is compensation but very, very rarely a fixed rate of income) or windfall years or capital gains and hand wave them all together as "salary." In the scenario I encountered, the couple lucked out in they both work at the same place and the company stock has appreciated significantly, but what wasn't said is that they cannot sustain that income beyond one year. It's quite possible to make over $1M in a year, at least on paper -- I've done it a few times in my career. Making that much year over year without any windfalls is certainly more challenging. I'd never state "yeah I make over $1M/year" in a windfall year.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoGoing from Jonas Salk giving away the polio vaccine to profiteering off the most deadly pandemic in a generation tells you a lot about about the course of the past 100 years…
- skyyler 3y agoProfits have never been higher!
- jncfhnb 3y ago> Bancel's haul was largely from pre-planned stock sales, and he has said that he will donate much of it to charity. the best faith interpretation of this seems crazy to me.
- sieste 3y agoI dont understand this comment, sorry.
- jncfhnb 3y agoSelling shares to raise money to donate to charity feels highly likely to net negative social good regardless of how the funds are spent. You could simply retain ownership of an important biomedical company or you could share it with employees. Selling shares for money that you then give away is dumb.
- throwoutway 3y agoSelling shares for money to donate to charity is actually a tax mistake. I've done it and regret it. Just donate the shares to the charity and let them cash it out. Surely the CEO has a tax advisor to advise... so this leads me to believe that very little of it will "go to the charities"
- devinl 3y agoIt wouldn't always be a mistake. Moderna stock is significantly lower than it was in 2021 so the CEO could be harvesting losses.
- dogma1138 3y agoPre-planned sales for execs are often buybacks or are sold to selected investors/shareholders. Companies often impose limits on how many shares execs and employees in general can hold at any give. time, and most regulatory/legal frameworks put caps too. In the UK for example when employees own more than 5% share in a company they are no longer treated as regular employees.
- JimtheCoder 3y agoIn general, I wouldn't have a problem with this. It was a preplanned stock sale, and the value of Moderna skyrocketed, predictably. But, this... "In a congressional hearing in March, Sanders highlighted that Moderna created its vaccine in partnership with the National Institutes of Health and received $1.7 billion in federal grant money for clinical development." sort of changes things. The solution? I am not sure.
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoWelcome to 20th century industry.
- mikeyouse 3y agoPerhaps we should do a sovereign wealth fund kind of thing where that type of funding grants the US taxpayer some common shares with no voting preference -- but if you think pure ROI -- $1.7B in investment to save millions and millions of lives worldwide isn't actually that problematic.
- henryfjordan 3y agoThe investment isn't the problem, the profits are. We clearly could've only spent $1.3B for the same outcome.
- JamesBarney 3y agoIt is not straight forward that in the counterfactual where we limited CEO pay with government grants in 2010 we would 100% still have a Moderna. I imagine CEOs would be a more hesitant to take government grants if we did. And if they didn't take the 1.7b maybe everything would be the same, or maybe the company would have died/rolled out the vaccine 2 years later. How profitable do we want to make pandemic preparedness? I think we should make it wildly profitable.
- twoodfin 3y ago$400 million in Moderna stock in 2023 doesn’t pay for vaccine clinical delivery in 2020!
- asynchronous 3y agoRemember your tax dollars funded this company’s profits directly.
- queuebert 3y agoNo, surely all of that profit is a direct result of the skills of the CEO. /s
- Jfjfnkdjdj 3y ago[dead]
- Karunamon 3y agoThat comparison to employee median salary, and not including in the headline the fact that this is from stock sales scheduled in advance, is a blatant attempt to sow outrage (clickbait) rather than honestly inform.
- Nullabillity 3y agoComp is comp…?
- semiquaver 3y ago> Moderna created its vaccine in partnership with the National Institutes of Health and received $1.7 billion in federal grant money for clinical development. Is the vaccine subject to any patents or other restrictions that would prevent a generic version? If so, why is this allowed when its development was largely paid for by the public?
- mrguyorama 3y agoBeing sold to pharma and insurance companies is the one thing that Democrats and Republicans agree on.
- ksey3 3y agoCuz the majority want to emulate the same behavior. Dont underestimate how mentally bankrupt everyone is.
- twoodfin 3y ago"Clinical development" != "development". Given their existing platform, developing the vaccine itself took weeks and a fraction of that cost. Clinical development means solving manufacturing and distribution issues, running trials, ... once you have a promising candidate vaccine in hand. It was extremely fortunate, as it turns out, that somebody had previously invested the megadollars to build that platform in hopes that it would turn out to be useful. It was a modestly risky bet, lots of biotech VC cash ends up being set on fire. Nobody will invest in the next Moderna if they believe the Feds will effectively nationalize their investment if it turns out to be valuable/"essential" enough.
- exogeny 3y agoPeople want it both ways. They want private business to use the free market to develop more efficient and better solutions than a socialized system, but also a limit to just how much that free market should compensate them. Either you're a capitalist or you're not. If the company in question was Disney or Apple, this wouldn't be appearing on HN in any capacity.
- TylerE 3y agoWhen there is so much fat cattery in the private sector, it is no longer more efficient.
- pfannkuchen 3y agoHave Disney or Apple received billions from taxpayers?
- forinti 3y agoIn a way, they have, especially Disney, through IP laws. They have been granted protections which are not really fostering innovation and have just turned into rent seeking.
- AdamJacobMuller 3y agoWe have the worst of both worlds now, socialized risk with privatized profit.
- benjaminwootton 3y agoIndeed. Moderna was real science, real innovation, and mostly huge globs of real private capital at risk. And though I'm skeptical on almost anything "Covid", most people think he saved the world with this vaccine technology which has big potential in future. This is capitalism 101, and the spoils need to go to the victor for it to work. Any government funding does muddy the waters slightly, but anything they did contribute I assume was for the public good.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
- helaoban 3y agoModerna's only commercial product is the COVID-19 vaccine[1]. But hey, you were told to get the exact number of doses necessary to ensure the survival of humanity and no more than that! 1. https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1682852/000168285223000011/mrna-20221231.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1682852/0001... (see page 59).
- epups 3y agoWe should just go back to like 80% tax rate after $100M income.
- AH4oFVbPT4f8 3y agoI’ve often said this but at the 10M mark but I’ve not based that on anything. Is there a reason why you say 100M?
- jeffbee 3y agoIt was a lot better than that. The last time we had high marginal rates, they were 91% above $400k in 1963 dollars, which is ~$4 million 2023 dollars. Before Reagan we still had 70% marginal rate above what in 2023 dollars was about $725k.
- jjoonathan 3y agoIf we continue to let the ownership class exempt their changes-in-net-worth from what we call "income," it won't matter. Tax assets.
- rank0 3y agoHow much revenue do you expect from such a tax bracket? You should do some napkin math to see if it’ll actually make a difference. I suspect very few people report income in excess of $100M and an 80% bracket would do very little for society other than a vindictive gesture to placate the masses. Not saying we should or shouldn’t…but it’s not gonna fix all our problems like people think.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago> You should do some napkin math to see if it’ll actually make a difference. The napkin math says: 3900 employees. 400M is 2435x median income in the company, so that's $164k. So if we gave the CEO the same income as the median, and split the 400M across everybody else, they'd all have received a $102k bonus, a 62%-of-median-income bonus. You tell me if a 62% bonus for the year would make any difference in your life or not.
- purpleblue 3y agoHe deserves it. Basically one of the people pushing mRNA since 2011, more than 10 years ago. Regardless of the politics behind it (I'm particularly anti-covid vaccine myself after the dust has settled), it's indisputable that this technology has a pathway that works and could solve many diseases in the future.
- cm2012 3y agoGood. They made a world saving product just in time!
- cempaka 3y agoyes, we all would have perished if it was not for the mRNA Covid vaccines. China is over now because they didn't use them.
- talldatethrow 3y agoLook up the rates of heart damage. A Swiss study saw upwards of 1 in 35 showing heart damage.
- postpawl 3y agoLook up the rates of heart damage from actually getting Covid without being vaccinated?
- talldatethrow 3y agoLess than 1 in 1000 I believe?
- infamouscow 3y agoRemember, it took a year for the vaccines to be available. In the meantime everyone was contracting the virus and virtually everyone recovered. So if these vaccines magically reversed heart damage caused from contracting the virus, it's news to me and you should be able to cite a peer reviewed study not funded by the manufacturers or their investors.
- endisneigh 3y agoI’m curious to hear why it matters how much anyone makes. If the concern is that they’ll buy too much critical stuff, why not just limit that? If the concern is outsized political influence, why not stop that? Etc. I will say it’s strange the government doesn’t have substantial stake in this company given the subsidies. Same with Tesla and many others too.
- VoodooJuJu 3y agoThe concern here is that the profits were made possible by significant contributions from taxpayers [1] [2]. Privatized gains, socialized losses. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-29/covid-19-booster-shots-for-omicron-moderna-signs-1-7-billion-us-contract https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-29/covid-19-... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9975718/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9975718/
- endisneigh 3y agoI don’t think profits being made in part due to tax payers is an issue. It is an issue though that the taxpayers, through the government, do not have equity in the profit making machine, yes.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoLet's say there are 1000 people in an economy with $1M floating around. In one version of this scenario, every person ends up with $1000. In another version, most people end up with $500, and one person ends up with $500,000. This creates a scenario where the preferences of that one individual come to dominate the structure of the economy (because the preferences of the other 999 people will, in aggregate, be scatted and diverse). So this sort of distribution of income system creates an outsize influence in the ongoing nature of the economy, for no reason than that one person was somehow able to end up with a revenue flow 1000x larger than anyone else. Now, it could possibly that this person is very, very good at doing whatever they do to achieve such revenue. But is that any reason whatsoever to grant them such outsize influence over the nature of the economy?
- infamouscow 3y agoWhy is this news? Oh right, because everyone predicting this would happen in 2020 and 2021 was hastily banned from social media and given the greenlight by legacy media to be ostracized and marginalized by the body politic using the most utterly vacuous rhetoric imaginable. All the tobacco executives now working in the pharma industry must feel accomplished.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoWait, I thought that it was socialism or something to complain about income multiples at public corporations? Did they suddenly get ostracized and marginalized from the body politic, after years of being a core part of the US political system? Jeessh, you blink and you miss it.
- skylabmelody 3y agoNature Biotech comparing Moderna to Theranos in 2016: https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3488 https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3488
- alex_lav 3y agoIt's funny how COVID and vaccines instantly turn any conversation (even here) into kind of...mindless bias flailing? Many of these comments are A.) Antivaxx propaganda, B.) Whining about cancel culture.
- the_only_law 3y agoThe “guidelines” of this site went out the window a long time ago. Moderation occasionally comes by and clears out the worst flame bait, spam, and blatant off topic nonsense, but there’s just too much of it.