In exercising some of his stock options last year, BioNTech CEO Uğur Şahin, M.D., scored a whopping 259.5 million euros ($281 million) in calculated compensation.
BioNTech revealed the windfall in its annual report, published March 10.
In the fall of 2019, the company issued its CEO a large option grant. The award came three months before COVID emerged in China and six months before the World Health Organization declared the spread of the virus a pandemic.
Stock options are commonly used to retain valued employees. They give an employee the right to buy a specific number of shares at a pre-set price after a vesting period. The practice helps employers encourage employees to stay through the vesting period to take ownership of the options granted to them.
In BioNTech's 2020 annual report, the company said it agreed to grant Şahin "an option to purchase 4,374,963 of our ordinary shares, subject to Prof. Şahin’s continuous employment with us," based on the euro conversion of its initial public offering price of $15.
The options became exercisable in 2023, but the BioNTech CEO didn’t act on them until August of 2024. Şahin was able to buy shares at a price of 13.74 euros ($15.00) through the option arrangement, according to the March 10 filing.
On the day that Şahin exercised the options, the company’s closing price was at 73.68 euros, giving his 4,374,963 exercised shares an "intrinsic value" of 259.5 million euros ($281 million), BioNTech explained in the filing.
Added to his relatively modest compensation as CEO of the company, Şahin collected total compensation worth 265 million euros ($287 million) in 2024, according to the March 10 filing.
BioNTech’s value boomed during the pandemic. After combining with Pfizer to develop an mRNA vaccine in nine months, the company’s revenue grew from 482 million euros ($551 million) in 2020 to 19 billion euros ($22.5 billion) in 2021.
Even when BioNTech awarded the options in 2019, the company was on the rise. In 2018, BioNTech forged a partnership with Pfizer and drew a series A funding round of $270 million, which was followed by a series B round of $325 million in 2019. BioNTech debuted on the Nasdaq in the fall of 2019 at a price of $15 per share.
At the start of 2022, because of his 17.1% share in the company, Şahin was listed in the top 200 on the Bloomberg Billionaire Index with a personal worth of $11.3 billion.
While Şahin’s large equity-based payday is no doubt eye-popping, it’s not without precedent. In 2023, Moderna revealed (PDF) that CEO Stéphane Bancel realized more than $392 million in value by exercising 10-year stock options during the prior year. In May of 2022, Bancel pledged to exercise the options, sell the shares and donate after-tax proceeds to charity. In Şahin’s case, exercising the options does not equate to selling shares.