People expect interest when they park a large amount of money in a bank. Where should that interest come from when the money just sits there? The bank will have to invest is somewhere (ideally somewhere very safe like in Government bonds) where they can then collect interest.
So it looks like in this case SVB chose MBS with a pretty low interest rate and long maturity, which they now have to sell due to the bank run you mentioned.
what's also scary is that he could do this with pretty much every public company he wants (very few exceptions of companies with >200B market cap or so).
I don't think that's the main issue. I think it's that the general assumption is that Moderna vaccine is about 90% effective and AstraZeneca about 60% effective.
I don't know how well you can actually compare these 2 numbers and if those are even the most important numbers, but that's part of the problem: Most people only look at these numbers and that's why they would prefer the Moderna vaccine.
What also comes into the picture here is the extremely high cost of living in the Bay Area. Even startups have to offer $200k in non-"maybe" compensation to make sure people can afford living here. Even a relatively small size startup with 50 people now already has $10 million in salary costs per year (not even counting taxes, benefits, etc.).
So overall the balance is tilted very much in favor of the big companies that can afford paying people that much. I'm wondering how that changes where startups get started. Is the Bay Area still the dominant place for this?