Moderna CEO cashes in

Rolling out vaccines across most of the world is the right thing to do for everyone. It’s just that little bit sweeter if you can make 408 million bucks in the process.

Pushing the demand

Moderna was in the right place at the right time. The pharma giant has played a vital role in developing and rolling out Covid vaccines around the world and has been richly rewarded for doing so. The firm’s share price rocketed 600% while it was producing the jab – a handsome reward for doing humanity’s great work.

So it would be rude if someone – I don’t know, maybe an already well-paid CEO – didn’t take advantage of it. Stephane Bancel reluctantly agrees, and while millions were dying, falling ill and losing work, he stepped up to be the rags-to-riches hero we truly all needed.

Raking it in

Bancel has sold more than 2.8 million shares of Moderna’s stock since January 2020, coming to a sweet $408 million windfall. 10b5-1 is a scheme that allows executives to sell stocks at regular intervals, but one thing it doesn’t account for is transparency – those same executives don’t need to make any disclosures about their cashing in, nor how much they’ve made.

So while publicly, Bancel might well have felt a touch more reluctant to cash in on life-saving vaccines, who’s got the balls to tell him he can’t?