Surging Moderna Stock Mints The Vaccine Maker’s Fifth Billionaire

For the fifth time since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, the skyrocketing stock price of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based vaccine maker Moderna has produced a billionaire. After CEO Stéphane Bancel, chairman and cofounder Noubar Afeyan and founding investors Timothy Springer and Robert Langer, Moderna president Stephen Hoge has become the company’s latest shareholder and executive to join the three-comma-club, with an estimated $1.1 billion fortune.

While Moderna shares have dipped this week on the news that a rival Covid-19 vaccine produced by Novavax demonstrated 90% overall efficacy against the virus, including variants, the company’s stock is still up 29% over the past month. That rise has come as the firm applied for emergency authorization from the FDA for use of its Covid-19 vaccine in adolescents and also increased its forecasted production of vaccine in 2021, from 800 million doses to one billion.

Hoge, 45, first joined Moderna in 2012 after two years as a partner in McKinsey’s healthcare practice in New York, and much of his wealth is tied up in his shares in the biotech outfit. He owns 0.4% of Moderna stock—worth $365 million—in addition to about $685 million in options. A spokesperson for Moderna did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Much like his fellow Moderna shareholders, Hoge frequently sells stock, recording $65.5 million in sales of Moderna shares (pre-tax) from March 2020 to April 2021. He also owns a small 0.2% stake in Axcella Health, a biotech firm focused on using new combinations of the human body’s biological molecules to treat complex diseases, where he has been a board member since 2014.

Hoge, who graduated from the University of California, San Francisco with an M.D. in 2003 after earning his bachelor’s in neuroscience at Amherst College, is the only Moderna billionaire who is also a doctor. He spent several years practicing medicine as a resident physician in New York before joining McKinsey in 2010. He then joined Moderna as a senior vice president of corporate development, new drug concepts and oncology in 2012 before getting promoted to president in 2015.

As president, Hoge leads all of Moderna’s research and development efforts and also heads its clinical development office, a role which put him at the center of the drugmaker’s successful push to develop a Covid-19 vaccine last year. Hoge led the team that first inserted mutations from another coronavirus, the one that causes MERS, into the SARS-CoV-2 virus’ genetic sequence to create a piece of the spike protein which could teach the immune system to fight it.

Hoge is just the latest example of a wave of more than 40 new billionaires who made ten-figure fortunes with companies involved in the battle against Covid-19. In an interview with his alma mater’s magazine for its Summer 2021 issue, he linked Moderna’s success to the biotech industry’s entrepreneurial start-up culture.

“Entrepreneurs like to take risks to push in new directions,” he told UCSF Magazine. “In biotech, we often build upon research coming out of academia and try to translate it into something that impacts human health.”