Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel explains that recent executive stock sales were mostly from pre-planned trading programs set up before the company's 2018 IPO, not panic selling. He says he's sold less than 1% of his holdings and actually owns more stock now than in January 2020 due to vesting options.
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I did want to mention, because we've been talking about it this morning and you've probably seen it in the papers and we've been talking about it for quite some time, stock sales. And earlier this morning in the program, we had asked Dr. Scott Gottlieb about stock sales among some of the vaccine makers, including your own. And Dr. Gottlieb sits on the board, we should say, of Pfizer and Illumina. And here's what he said about stock sales during the pandemic.
I wouldn't be trading in my stock right now in this kind of environment. But, you know, people have the right to do it. And a lot of these are preplanned sales. As you know. So you can make an argument that withdrawing a preplanned sale would be as bad as putting one in place. And so if you have this set up a long time ago, you probably might not be appropriate to change it now.
So I think the, the fairest question to ask is, do you plan to sell any more of your shares at this point?
So what we have done is we've set up, you know, 10b5 plans a long time ago. If you look Most of the team set up plans when we went public. You might remember, Andrew, this was in December 2018. Obviously, when we set up those plans, none of us had any idea what was going to happen in 2020. And as Dr. Gottlieb said, you know, there are very clear regulations by the SEC of when you can or cannot change those plans. And as you can imagine, right now we are in a blackout period. We're not allowed to amend or change the plans. That would be against the very spirit of those plans. So those plans were set up a long time ago. And of course, none of us had any idea that the stock would be at this level right now.
Stephane, I wanted to continue along that line of questioning because it appears, at least on the surface, and this is a big pillar for the bear case on your stock, that executives have been aggressively selling $161 million in stock since the beginning of the year, just in the first 2 weeks of July. I went through the filings that you had with the SEC. There were 5 separate filings that sold more than 71,000 shares of Moderna stock. And at the average price, that would be more than $4 million in sales in just the first 2 weeks of July. You say that this plan was, was put in place before, but, but at the same time, you believe that the best is yet to come, I would presume, for your company stock. Would you consider offsetting those sales with open market purchases then?
So thanks for the question. So first, again, this is highly regulated. I could not today place a new plan in place because we are in a lockout period. I cannot stop a plan, start a plan for either selling or buying the stock. I think if you look at the big picture, I have sold less than 1% of my holdings in the company since the company went public. I've been buying stock in every financing of the company when it was private, from Series A to Series G, every round. I'm the only investor in the world who has done so. I think for any investor who owns Moderna stock, 99% of my wealth is in Moderna stock. It's going to remain like this. The other piece that people, I think, sometimes don't appreciate because you have to do a lot of work in the numbers is that given my stock options that have been awarded by the board over the years, I get new stock vesting every quarter. And so if you do the math overall, my holding of Moderna is not going down. Actually, in the January 1st to June 30th period for which I have the numbers, it actually went up. I own more stock of Moderna on June 30th than I own on January 1st.
Just one final question related to this, and it might help clarify things. Your founder and chairman, who also runs Flagship Ventures, sold $68 million of stock on May 21st on behalf of Flagship Ventures. Obviously, he is a board member of your company. Therefore, he's an insider. There was no scheduled plan in advance for that. Would you ask him not to sell shares going forward?
So again, the decision that Flagship has to make, you know, they have their own LPs. And they have their own fiduciary responsibility. What I can tell you is that at the date when the stock trade happened, it was an open window. This was cleared by the legal team. And so this was done according to processes. You know, Flagship has been a long-term investor in the company. They started the company. They've invested in the company since 2010. This is 10 years ago. As you know, funds have, you know, timeframes for which they have to liquidate or distribute the shares to their LPs. So I think this is the normal course of business. If you look at Flagship, they are still the number one shareholder of the company with, I think, close to 20% ownership in the company. So again, this is not surprising that sometimes they have to distribute or sell stock. It's just common purpose of business.
