As the CEO of Moderna, one of the laboratories that developed a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, Frenchman Stéphane Bancel has seen his fortune grow from $460 million to $10.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
In an interview with Le Parisien, he said he does not intend to leave this amount entirely to his children. “My wife and I intend to give them the essentials … We told them, ‘We’re paying for your education, and we’ll bequeath you a family home, then it’s up to you to manage.’”
“Today, we already support about 10 associations, committed to health, inequality, and education. My wife having been adopted, these themes are very close to her heart, as well as mine,” says Bancel. “We help former American prisoners to reintegrate, and we support an association in Haiti. I’ve never been interested in money.”
Originally from Marseille, Bancel began his career in marketing at the Lyon-based laboratory BioMérieux. “After Harvard, all my classmates chose to pursue a career in IT, where they were sure to make money quickly, but I took a risk and went into healthcare,” he said. “I always wanted to provide a home for my family, to feed them, but my ambition was never to collect houses, cars or boats.”
