After another year of transformational revenue from Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine, the company has rewarded CEO Stéphane Bancel with a pay package of $19.4 million, according to a proxy statement (PDF). It is a raise of $1.2 million from the $18.2 million he earned in 2021.
But that's not all Bancel made in running Moderna in 2022. He also collected more $392 million in sales of stock he owned in the company.
Bancel spelled out the windfall in a blog post on Sunday, reitterating his intention to donate after-tax proceeds to charity. Bancel gave away $176 million in 2022 and so far this year, his donations have totaled $76 million, he wrote.
Last May in anothet blog post, Bancel revealed that he was sitting on a fortune of stock options that were due to expire in August of this year. It was then that Bancel began selling off stock in weekly increments with the intention of funding two charitable organizations that he and his wife had established.
His company had another big year in 2022, scoring authorization for two omicron-adjusted bivalent vaccines, helping the company reach $18.4 billion in global vaccine sales. That figure fell short of the company's estimate at the start of the year of $22 billion, but it did exceed Moderna's $17.7 billion figure from 2021.
Moderna also used its windfall to advance its pipeline of programs built around its mRNA technology. The company now has three programs in phase 3 testing.
Part of the difference in Bancel’s pay came from a $500,000 salary increase last year to $1.5 million. The CEO also nabbed a $1.2 million increase in his bonus.
On the flip side, Bancel’s stock and option awards, which reached $15 million in 2021, came to roughly $14.5 million in 2022.
Bancel, 50, collected $12.9 million in total pay in 2020, when Moderna was developing its vaccine with the help of approximately $2.5 billion in grants and vaccine purchase agreements from the United States government. Bancel earned $8.9 million in 2019 before the company became a household name.
Moderna explained in its proxy that it bases executive compensation on a “peer group” analysis, consisting of “companies against which we may compete for talent and that are similar to us across a number of factors, including market capitalization, stage of development, geographical location and number of employees.”
The peer group includes giants AbbVie, Amgen, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Gilead, Merck and Pfizer. In 2022, Moderna added three new companies—Alnylam, Incyte and BioMarin—to the peer group to bring it up to 15 members.
Aside from his compensation package changes, Bancel’s “change of control” severance package has dropped to $464 million from $926 million at the end of 2021. The value of the golden parachute is tied closely to the value of Moderna’s stock, the company explained in the filing.
Moderna’s other top executives also were well compensated. President Stephen Hoge, M.D., collected $8.6 million, up from $7.8 million in 2021. He also made more than $56 million in 2022 exercising his stock options.
Chief commercial officer Arpa Garay made $7.7 million in her first year with the company. New chief financial officer James Mack received $7.3 million. Juan Andres, the president of strategic partnerships and enterprise expansion collected $6.1 million, down from $6.6 million in 2021, while also collecting more than $11 million in stock options.
Editor's Note: Story was updated to include Bancel's income from stock sales in 2022 and his contributions to charity.