Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel sells $400m shares and deletes Twitter account

     Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel sells $400m shares and deletes Twitter account

Moderna, Inc. is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical and biotechnology business that specializes in RNA therapies, particularly mRNA vaccines. To elicit an immunological response, these vaccines use a copy of a molecule called messenger RNA (mRNA).

The company's only commercial product is the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. The company has 23 treatment and vaccine candidates, of which 15 have entered clinical trials. Vaccine candidates include influenza, HIV, respiratory syncytial virus, Epstein–Barr virus, the Nipah virus, chikungunya, a combined single-shot COVID-19 booster, an influenza vaccine, a cytomegalovirus vaccine, and two cancer vaccines. The company's pipeline also includes candidates for cancer immunotherapy using OX40 ligand, interleukin 23, IL36G, and interleukin 12 as well as, in partnership with AstraZeneca, a regenerative medicine treatment that encodes vascular endothelial growth factor A to stimulate blood vessel growth for patients with myocardial ischemia.

Bancel sold 10,000 of his shares of MRNA stock, according to Yahoo! Finance, after the average price of $178.29 increased by 3.06 percent. Several Twitter users noticed that Bancel canceled his Twitter account without explanation, in addition to selling his shares.

Bancel liquidated hundreds of millions of dollars in stock and deleted his Twitter account just days after Pfizer disclosed a safety assessment may take billions off their stock market valuation according to the rumors spreading and circulating.

Bancel did not "dump" $400 million worth of stock all at once in February 2022, contrary to popular belief.

For years, Bancel had been selling a small percentage of his stock on a virtually weekly basis. To avoid insider trading, these transactions were made at fixed periods in compliance with Rule 10b5-1 of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. Bancel sold less than $10 million worth of shares (until mid-month) in February 2022, falling short of the $400 million reported in this article by around $390 million.

It's also worth noting that Bancel's 10b5-1 plan foresaw all of these sales. To put it another way, Bancel did not "dump" stocks in response to a recent occurrence or anticipated "bad news." These sales, on the other hand, took place at predetermined periods.

Bancel was selling 19,000 shares every week on average. While this may appear to be a large sum, it was only a small portion of Bancel's estimated 21 million Moderna shares as of February 2022. Bancel is selling about.00009 percent of his total shares when he sells 19,000 shares.

Bancel had been gradually selling his stock since 2019, far before the COVID-19 pandemic and before Moderna discovered a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Quartz.

Bancel has been steadily selling Moderna stock since late 2019, well before the covid-19 pandemic hit and the business announced that it was working on an mRNA vaccine. The company's market worth was around $6.5 billion before the pandemic, but it has since dropped to $65 billion after reaching a high of $195 billion in August 2021. This increase and fall, not Bancel's trades, determine the value of his holdings. He still controls more than 21.8 million Moderna shares worth $3.5 billion, making him the company's largest insider stakeholder.

While the reason for the account's deletion is unknown, it is unlikely to be related to Bancel "dropping $400 million" in stock, as Bancel did not dump $400 million in stock and the Twitter account that was deleted was rarely used and wasn’t linked to Moderna’s official accounts.