Moderna Therapeutics’ long-awaited IPO filing means two things: The company is one step closer to going public, and the world finally gets a look under the hood at the famously secretive firm.
On that second point, we now get to gawk at executive pay figures, marvel at just how many bankers are involved, and speculate on what a (very brief) Food and Drug Administration clinical hold might mean for the future. Here’s what we learned from Moderna’s IPO filing.
It pays to run a unicorn
Moderna may be a fledgling company with nothing close to an approved product, but that didn’t stop it from paying like a proper pharma company. The firm’s top three executives made a combined $40 million in cash and stock in 2017. That’s a lot for a private biotech company, even if it is a unicorn. For comparison, in 2017, private biotechs Orchard Therapeutics, Guardant Health, and Rubius Therapeutics each paid their top three managers less than a quarter of what Moderna did.
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