What Is This CEO Doing to Earn $450 Per Hour? – Geron Corporation (GERN)

Including Scarlett’s pay, Geron Corporation (NASDAQ:GERN) expects to burn through about $33 million this year. That’s a lot of money waiting around for clinical trial data. Geron doesn’t plan on running any company-sponsored clinical trials in 2013. If the investigator-sponsored trial comes back positive it’ll start planning for the next trial, which won’t start until next year.

Is fighting back the best move?
Lawton didn’t say, but it seems safe to assume that his Catoosa Fund owns shares of Geron. The question I have is: Why bother fighting back?

If you don’t like the burn rate, sell at a loss and move on. Go buy Simon Property Group, Inc (NYSE:SPG) or Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) or one of the myriad of companies that give shareholders a say on pay. Shareholders of both companies rejected their CEO pay policies last year. Who can blame them. Citigroup’s CEO, Vikram Pandit, produced a 90% loss for shareholders over five years.

Or better yet, buy a successful company. Fellow Fool Daniel Miller thinks Alan Mulally is worth every penny Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) is paying him. Shareholders might balk at the nearly 1 milllion shares of stock options he was awarded this year, worth about $12 million at today’s prices, but he’s turned the company from red to black. Geron Corporation (NASDAQ:GERN), by contrast, hasn’t had a profitable year in its entire existence.

Geron Corporation (NASDAQ:GERN), on the other hand, has lost more than $850 million since it was founded in 1990. With less than $100 million in the bank, it’ll almost certainly have do another round of public financing.

Good thing the investment bank analysts are still talking nice.

The article What Is This CEO Doing to Earn $450 Per Hour? originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Brian Orelli.

Fool contributor Brian Orelli has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Ford. The Motley Fool owns shares of Citigroup Inc and Ford.

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