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

Very convenient of you to entirely sidestep discussion of the original point: “80% income tax bracket at >$100M”

It’s ridiculous that so many users of this startup accelerator forum want to ban private ownership. I guess I’ll bite…

Why would anyone start/own a company if the government is just gonna liquidate your legal ownership? It would be more lucrative to find the easiest job and do the bare minimum than be CEO under your half baked authoritarian system.

But why is this even a response in the first place to OP? Stick to the topic or else you come off like a religious zealot.

Pretty sure the median Moderna employee who’s been around as long as the CEO has seen some very nice pop to their stock comp as well.

Selling 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"

Pre-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.

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.

$400 million in Moderna stock in 2023 doesn’t pay for vaccine clinical delivery in 2020!

> How exactly is the preference of the one individual dominant?

The other 999 people will have a diverse set of preferences for services and goods within the economy. They will share some, and not others. But each of them has only $500 to spend on those services and goods, and so anything not widely shared among them doesn't offer much of an incentive in terms of potential income to anyone who might offer goods and services. If something doesn't appeal to a sizable majority of the 999, there's likely to be too little chance at sufficient revenue to pursue it.

By contrast, the high value individual has $500,000 available to spend on their own singular preferences for goods and services, providing a strong incentive for providers of those things to cater to this individual. The changes of being to have a reliable, significant revenue flow from doing what they want are quite good.

Consequently, the economy ends up being structured (to some degree) around the preferences of the wealthy individual, rather than the broader public.

Of course, this is not a "hard divide" ... obviously there will be some things that all 999 others (and even the 1 rich individual) want, and some part of the economy will respond to that. However, even for such basic things as, say, bread, preferences can be wildly divergent, meaning that a single provider is not likely to tap into the entire potential market for that generic. And obviously there are also risks in this thought experiment scenario, because there is only a single high wealth individual - fail to accurately target their preferences, and you're potentially worse off than catering to everyone else.

Obviously, a more realistic example would (e.g.) involve 1% (say, 3M) individuals of high net worth/income, amidst 330M+ individuals of varying levels of net worth/income. In this scenario, there is more scope for providers of goods and services to cater to relatively unpopular things, because amidst the 330M lower-income folk, there will likely be enough to make it potentially worthwhile.

But this is true only to a point. If enough of the lower income folk don't really have much disposable income at all, their preferences for non-essential items will not translate into actual purchases of goods and services that they may otherwise be desirous of.

And of course, with 1M high income people, their preferences will be more diverse than in the thought experiment. However, the deck is still stacked in favor of businesses that seek to cater to those with more money, because of the unbalanced distribution of wealth & income.

In this more realistic example (i.e. the contemporary USA), a sizable chunk of the economy remains focused on the preferences/needs of the majority. But a much bigger slice of GDP flows around the preferences and needs of the very wealthy than would be the case with a more balanced distribution of income/wealth, and I maintain that this constitutes a harm to the economy and the entire population.

This analysis is focused on economic power, not political power.

If it was about political power, it would still have to be noted that despite some effort, the fact that wealth doesn't literally buy you extra votes doesn't eliminate wealth giving you more influence over political priorities and decisions.

Less than 1 in 1000 I believe?

Remember, 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.

As described in peer comments, mRNA was a platform developed in the decade prior with over $3 billion of private risk capital. The government came in to help them get the Covid vaccine to market using that existing platform.