The FDA Is Set To Approve Moderna’s Covid Vaccine—Yet The Three Billionaires Behind The…

Good news in Moderna’s quest for a Covid-19 vaccine is not translating to good fortune for the three billionaires behind the Massachusetts-based biotech company. Moderna’s vaccine was endorsed by a Food and Drug Administration panel on Thursday, and will likely be approved for emergency use by the FDA later today — making it the second FDA-approved vaccine for the virus that has caused a global pandemic. That should lead to billions in revenues in 2021. Yet Moderna shares have been falling. Since peaking on December 8 at $169.86, Moderna stock has dropped 17% to $140.23 at the close of trading on Friday, December 18.

The decline in Moderna’s share price has shaved a collective $1.7 billion off of the net worths of Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel and two early investors in the firm, Harvard professor Timothy Springer and MIT’s Robert Langer, over the past 10 days.

All three men have become billionaires in 2020 thanks to Moderna’s stunning rise, with the stock up more than 600% since the beginning of January. Bancel, 47, joined the company as its CEO in 2011 — one year after its founding — and owns a 7% stake along with a sizable chunk of stock options, giving him an estimated net worth of $4.5 billion. Springer and Langer were both founding investors in the firm and have never sold a share, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Springer owns a 3.5% stake in Moderna, part of a $2.2 billion fortune (down from $2.6 billion on December 8); Langer owns 3%, part of his estimated $1.7 billion net worth (down from $2 billion 10 days ago).

Analysts expect Moderna to post $800 million in sales in 2020 thanks in part to government funding for its Covid-19 vaccine program, up from $60.2 million last year. That could balloon to as much as $10 billion revenue in 2021 as the vaccine is rolled out across the globe. Moderna shares are expected to remain volatile in the near future as investors have already priced in the anticipated FDA approval and will now look to the company’s profitability beyond its Covid-19 vaccine. “The approval is an important positive, but it was widely expected already,” says Michael Yee, an analyst at investment bank Jefferies.

It’s part of a wider trend among pharmaceutical companies linked to the Covid-19 effort. Shares of Nasdaq-listed German biotech outfit BioNTech — which partnered with Pfizer on a successful Covid-19 vaccine already being rolled out in the U.S. and the U.K. — have fallen 19% since December 8. That drop shrunk the net worths of BioNTech’s cofounder Uğur Şahin and the firm’s most prominent backers, billionaire twins Andreas and Thomas Struengmann, by a collective $3.8 billion.

With the Moderna vaccine slated to be released to the general public in 2021, investors are expected to place more of a focus on the company’s drug pipeline outside of Covid-19. That includes a host of potential drugs and vaccines against the zika virus and the chikungunya virus, as well as vaccines that target tumors caused by cancers like melanoma.

“What we have seen is some selling on the news upon approval of a Covid-19 therapeutic,” says Hartaj Singh, an analyst at brokerage firm Oppenheimer & Co. “For next year, people are focused on the recurring revenue the company will accrue, not just the one-time benefit in 2021 from pent-up Covid-19 demand.”