Patrick Soon-Shiong performed the world’s first pig-to-man cell transplant to treat diabetes. He sold two drug companies, making enough to become a billionaire and buy a stake in the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team. Now Soon-Shiong can also add this distinction to his resume: the highest-paid U.S. executive of 2015.
The 63-year-old physician received a $329.7 million pay package last year as chief executive officer of NantKwest Inc., a cancer-research firm that went public last July and has a market value of $715.5 million. That sum vaults him to the No. 1 spot on the Bloomberg Pay Index, a ranking of the top-paid executives at companies that trade on U.S. exchanges. Most of his pay stems from 19.4 million stock options granted before the initial public offering.
Dealmaker Paul J. Taubman is No. 2 on the list with $164 million in awarded pay, after merging his boutique bank with the advisory businesses of Blackstone Group LP and spinning off the combined business, PJT Partners Inc., in October. He’s followed by Google Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai who received $151.9 million as he was tapped to run the search-engine unit of parent Alphabet Inc.
“You pay the Michael Jordans more because they’re the Michael Jordans,” said David Hofrichter, a senior partner at Aon Hewitt’s executive compensation and governance practice.
Tumor Fighter
Soon-Shiong paid $47 million in December 2014 for a 31 percent stake in NantKwest, which researches treatments that use the human immune system to fight tumors. Three months later, he was named chairman and CEO.
Most of his options have strike prices of about $2, according to a regulatory filing from the San Diego-based company. NantKwest closed at $8.73 on Wednesday, down 50 percent since year-end. Some of the options are tied to reaching goals, while the remainder vest through March 2019. His 2015 pay also included 600,000 restricted shares, a $386,301 cash bonus and $1 in salary.
Soon-Shiong is the world’s 116th-richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s thanks in part to selling APP Pharmaceuticals Inc., which he founded, in 2008 and Abraxis BioScience Inc. in 2010. He bought a 4.5 percent stake in the Lakers from Earvin “Magic” Johnson in 2010.
Michael Sitrick, a spokesman for Soon-Shiong and NantKwest, declined to comment on his compensation.
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