When a novel coronavirus struck in early 2020, Pfizer ’s chief executive, Dr. Albert Bourla , saw an opportunity to help save the world. He pushed the drugmaker to deliver a Covid-19 vaccine at lightning speed.
The Greek-born CEO’s bold bet paid off. The shot turned Pfizer into a household name, while ringing up tens of billions of dollars in sales. Bourla’s cellphone hummed with calls from leaders around the world. The experience, he said in a commencement speech afterward, showed the virtue of “setting ambitious goals that are seemingly impossible.”
But now Bourla is under attack because Pfizer’s stock price is way down, in part because it miscalculated demand for its Covid-19 vaccine, and some of the ambitious goals Bourla has set in the years since the pandemic have yet to pan out.
An activist investor is leading the charge. Starboard Value, a hedge fund that has waged fights in recent months against Autodesk, Salesforce and Tinder parent Match Group, recently took a roughly $1 billion stake in Pfizer. The sides held their first meeting on Wednesday, after Starboard accused the company of pressuring two former executives who had been working with Starboard to express support for Bourla.
It’s a moment of reckoning for Bourla, 62, a veterinarian by training who joined Pfizer in his early 30s from academia and moved all over the globe for the company as he climbed the corporate ladder.
Bourla enjoys strong support from Pfizer’s board of directors, according to people familiar with the board’s thinking. Members recognize Bourla’s success spearheading the Covid-19 vaccine, and steps he has taken to right the ship over the last year, including multibillion-dollar cost-cutting programs. The CEO has also reorganized the company, creating a separate cancer-drug research unit in a bet that breakthroughs there will bring in billions in new sales.
But Pfizer so far has been unable to escape its postpandemic slump. After the Covid-19 emergency receded, sales of the company’s vaccine and antiviral tanked, much more than executives forecast. New drug launches under-delivered. Pfizer’s first stab at the booming anti-obesity market flamed out.
Wall Street noticed, sending Pfizer stock down. Today Wall Street values Pfizer at roughly $166 billion, roughly half its peak during the pandemic.
Starboard’s campaign turned bitter fast. The investor was working with two now-retired Pfizer executives, former CEO Ian Read and former Chief Financial Officer Frank D’Amelio. Read had handpicked Bourla to be his successor. D’Amelio had worked alongside Bourla in the company’s C-suite.
Last week, Read and D’Amelio issued a statement expressing support for Bourla. Starboard publicly accused Pfizer of threatening lawsuits and other measures unless the pair made public statements of support. Pfizer has declined to comment. Read and D’Amelio did not respond to requests for comment.
Their involvement—even if fleeting—has made the activist fight personal for Bourla, who feels betrayed, according to people familiar with the matter. Bourla declined an interview request.
‘Everything is possible’
Bourla grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece, the nation’s second-largest city. The son of Holocaust survivors, Bourla has said his mother’s optimism was a big influence. She taught him to “never say ‘this is impossible.’ Everything is possible. Just have faith, believe and try,” he once said on a Bloomberg podcast. “That is something that put a stamp on me at a very young age”
His middle- and high-school education in Greece was heavy on the study of ancient philosophers. But he also had a love of both medicine and animals, he told the Leadership Matters podcast in 2022, and decided to study veterinary medicine.
He earned a doctorate in the biotechnology of reproduction from the Veterinary School of Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. He was doing animal-health research at Aristotle University in 1993 when a recruiter convinced him to take a sabbatical and try working at Pfizer in Athens. “I wish I could say it was a vision that drove me to Pfizer,” he joked during a talk at the University of Oxford’s business school last year. “It was a salary that I couldn’t resist.”
Bourla, who relocated his family eight times and lived in five different countries while working for Pfizer, arrived in New York—where the company is based—in 2001. He played key roles in the successful launches of breast-cancer drug Ibrance and bloodthinner Eliquis, medicines now among the company’s bestsellers. Bourla, who keeps photos of Pfizer patients in his office, rose to oversee the company’s cancer, heart and other innovative drugs before taking its helm in 2019.
“On the day I was named CEO,” Bourla wrote in his 2022 book, ‘Moonshot,’ “the Pfizer board of directors called me into a conference room…. I thanked them, smiled, and said aloud, ‘Only in America!’ Only in America could a Greek immigrant with a thick accent become CEO of one of the world’s biggest corporations.”
Soon after becoming CEO, Bourla took company leadership on a Silicon Valley tour, visiting tech giants including Google, Apple and Salesforce to understand their recipes for success. “Companies that stay true to their purpose perform much better,” Bourla said in an interview afterward.
The visit helped shape Bourla’s decision to double down on Pfizer’s bet on innovative medicines.
After roughly eight months at the helm, Bourla struck a deal to hive off Pfizer’s off-patent drugs business and merge it with generic pharmaceutical company Mylan. He also guided Pfizer’s plan to spin out its division selling medicine-chest staples, such as Advil and vitamins, to combine it with GSK ’s own consumer-health business. It’s now a separate public company called Haleon.
The moves left Pfizer a leaner company that could grow sales faster if its innovative drugs in development panned out, but cost Pfizer steady cash flow.
“He’s willing to take calculated, smart risks,” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner who is now a Pfizer board member. “Covid is obviously the best example of this.”
After Covid-19 emerged, Pfizer partnered with Germany’s BioNTech to use its then-unproven gene-based vaccine technology, called mRNA, to develop a vaccine. Bourla urged his company’s researchers to work fast. When he assembled his executive team via videoconference in March 2020, he told them he wanted a vaccine ready by the fall—an ambitious request given the typical shot takes more than a decade to develop.
Inside Pfizer, the vaccine program was dubbed “Project Lightspeed.”
Before it was clear whether the vaccine would work, Bourla also pressured Pfizer manufacturing staff to ramp up capacity to make the shots. It was a huge, risky commitment. Bourla sought the company’s board of directors’ approval to spend more than $1 billion on the buildup.
Among those inside the company who opposed such a large outlay was D’Amelio, then the CFO, according to people familiar with the matter.
Then Bourla doubled down on the manufacturing bet. During one of Pfizer’s twice-weekly meetings on the project, in summer 2020, he told the team he wanted them to increase commercial production at least 10-fold. “Why can’t we make more and why can’t we make it sooner?” Bourla demanded.
“What we’re doing already is a miracle,” Mike McDermott, Pfizer’s manufacturing boss, said he responded.
‘Always aim high’
Bourla’s pandemic parlay resulted in Pfizer quickly shipping billions of vaccine doses around the world. The company’s stock soared as it reaped more than $100 billion in sales in 2022.
“Setting ambitious goals that are seemingly impossible based on conventional wisdom does not restrain human ingenuity. It liberates it. That’s why you should always aim high,” Bourla told graduates during a 2022 commencement speech at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.
But the company’s pandemic success obscured long-term issues at Pfizer. Some of its top-selling drugs, such as arthritis treatment Xeljanz, are getting older and nearing the loss of patent protection, when lower-priced generics can compete. Pfizer must find new sources of sales to fill the holes.
Bourla knew this and used the company’s pandemic cash windfall to go on an acquisition spree, hunting for Pfizer’s next big hit. He bought Arena Pharmaceuticals for $6.7 billion, in a bet on the bowel-disease drugs it had in development. He landed sickle-cell disease drug developer Global Blood Therapeutics for $5.4 billion. He acquired the rest of Biohaven Pharmaceutical Holding that Pfizer didn’t already own for about $11.6 billion, which provided a new migraine drug. And, in his boldest bet of all, he paid $43 billion down for cancer-drug biotech Seagen last year, doubling the size of Pfizer’s oncology pipeline.
Some analysts and investors have said Bourla overspent on those acquisitions, some of which have yet to bear fruit. Pfizer recently pulled a sickle-cell disease drug, Oxbryta, from the market. The launch of the migraine drug, Nurtec, started slowly.
A closely watched pill in development for treatment of obesity disappointed during testing, setting back Pfizer’s efforts to join one of the pharmaceutical industry’s hottest markets. Pfizer is now advancing another version of the anti-obesity drug.
Some of Pfizer’s R&D programs “haven’t worked out. It’s the nature of the business. A lot have,” Gottlieb said. “In this business you have to be willing to lean forward.”
Indeed, the company secured nine new drug approvals last year, including respiratory vaccine Abrysvo and multiple-myeloma treatment Elrexfio.
Still, David Risinger, a Leerink Partners analyst, forecasts that Pfizer’s revenue will decline between 2025 and 2030. He said it’s possible the company’s pipeline is developing drugs Wall Street is undervaluing, but it will take time for that to play out.
Predictions like that have opened the door for the activist push by Starboard. Starboard is expected to lay out its issues with the company’s recent direction at a conference called the 13D Monitor Active-Passive Investor Summit on Tuesday. The activist-investing firm declined to comment.
Bourla’s defenders say the CEO is operationally astute, in addition to being bold, and his acquisitions, cost-cutting and reorganization have positioned the company for a turnaround. They point to the company’s last two quarters of performance as evidence of improvement, and say third quarter results, if they prove strong, could bolster Pfizer and Bourla further.
