What’s a biotech CEO worth? The top 15 pay pack­ages puts a spot­light on per­for­mance — usu­al­ly

All biotech glo­ry is fleet­ing. But the high pay can con­tin­ue even af­ter the plau­dits and cheers are stilled.

Ex­am­in­ing this year’s list of the 15 high­est paid CEOs in biotech, you’ll find three ex-CEOs: Two who head­ed back to the biotech start­up world, the oth­er pushed out af­ter a sales scan­dal. They all got one last year of com­pen­sa­tion that dwarfs the pay­rolls of your av­er­age lit­tle biotech in search of fame and for­tune.

A con­sum­mate deal­mak­er leads the list, fol­lowed by a self-made bil­lion­aire, but be­tween the first and last you’ll see how com­pen­sa­tion at this stage of the game is fig­ured for your av­er­age high-pro­file en­ter­prise. With a cou­ple of glar­ing ex­cep­tions, they’re all gam­bling big on next-gen drugs, and sev­er­al are un­der ex­treme pres­sure to start pro­duc­ing some sol­id re­sults.

Of course, high ex­pec­ta­tions should go with high pay. You don’t get paid the big bucks for noth­ing. And none of these CEOs would be shy about ex­plain­ing why they qual­i­fy for the top pay in the in­dus­try.

Typ­i­cal­ly, they all make less than the Big Phar­ma CEOs you’ll find at the very top of every com­pen­sa­tion count down. Peo­ple like J&J’s Alex Gorsky (2016 com­pen­sa­tion $26.9 mil­lion) or Ken Fra­zier at Mer­ck ($21.8 mil­lion)  are on top with Ian Read ($17.3 mil­lion) and ex-Lil­ly CEO John Lech­leit­er ($18.3 mil­lion) com­ing in not far be­hind.

Hat tip to STAT, which help­ful­ly pulled a lot of raw da­ta on com­pen­sa­tion. I weed­ed out a bunch of non-biotechs from that list, in­clud­ing all the gener­ic play­ers, and added back­ground num­bers on salary and com­pen­sa­tion with some new com­men­tary for each. I added Medi­va­tion to in­clude David Hung’s com­pen­sa­tion and dropped Jazz, which has yet to file a proxy this year.

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(2,300 words re­main)