Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 95 posts

Re: Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

#22

Post by jameshart »

JimtheCoder wrote: post #5

In 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.

If the money came from stock sales, it didn't come out of the company's funding. It isn't that money that's funding this income. This income came from people who want to own a piece of the company's future success.

Now, I guess those people are anticipating maybe future profits to be made from NIH funds... but that's sort of the point of government grants to private enterprise. In return for putting their capital up to fund labs and equipment and research, investors expect to be compensated... and some of that compensation comes in the form of government contracts to produce lifesaving vaccines.

Re: Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

#25

Post by jeffbee »

epups wrote: post #18

We should just go back to like 80% tax rate after $100M income.

It 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.

Re: Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

#26

Post by JamesBarney »

henryfjordan wrote: post #16
mikeyouse wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps 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.

The investment isn't the problem, the profits are. We clearly could've only spent $1.3B for the same outcome.

It 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.

Re: Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

#27

Post by mrguyorama »

semiquaver wrote: post #10

> 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?

Being sold to pharma and insurance companies is the one thing that Democrats and Republicans agree on.

Re: Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

#28

Post by pfannkuchen »

exogeny wrote: post #13

People 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.

Have Disney or Apple received billions from taxpayers?
Post reply on HN