Biography & Early Wealth Journey

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

The NantKwest pay package for Dr. Soon-Shiong breaks down like this: $132 million in stock options, $15 million worth of restricted stock, a bonus of a little under $400,000, and a base salary of only a million dollars. With so much of the pay package tied up in stock options, that $150 million figure might be a little bit of a liberal estimate, especially since NantKwest's stock market fortunes have been in the midst of a pretty significant drop in value as of late – the company was worth $35 a share when it went public in the summer of last year, which had dropped down into single digit dollar values last week.

You probably shouldn't worry too much about his financial state, though, since Dr. Soon-Shiong has a net worth of over $12.6 billion, and a few stock points up or down probably aren't going to hurt his wallet too much. Soon-Shiong earned his first major fortune in 2008 when he sold his company American Pharmaceutical Partners to a German company for $5.6 billion. Prior to the acquisition, APP was earning $750 million in revenue, roughly $300 of which was profit. Soon-Shiong owned 80% of the company at the time of the sale. Two years later, Patrick sold the rights to a cancer drug he created to a biotech company Celgene for $3 billion in cash and stock

Primary Income Streams & Multi-Million Contracts

In any case, with the doctor's recently-announced Cancer MoonShot 2020 initiative to revolutionize treatment of the disease over the course of the next four years, he's got a lot on his plate. And if NantKwest, Inc. is able to turn its stock market performance around, he'll have even more.