Silicon Valley’s giants crowd the checklist of the world’s most beneficial firms, however drugmaker Eli Lilly is scorching on their heels. The corporate topped a market capitalization of 1 trillion {dollars} on Friday, changing into the primary enterprise within the well being trade to hit that milestone.
Lilly’s achievement comes throughout a tense week for inventory watchers. AI chipmaker Nvidia, which itself turned the primary $5 trillion firm lower than a month in the past, beat expectations with its newest quarterly earnings. However with AI overrepresented among the many world’s prime companies and large AI investments making headlines day-after-day, traders remain skittish that pleasure over the tech could be overblown.
Whereas Lilly nonetheless sits simply outdoors the worldwide prime ten most beneficial firms, its rise demonstrates that non-tech companies can nonetheless chart a path to the inventory market’s higher echelons. In Lilly’s case, that rise was powered by spiking curiosity in weight reduction medication – a pattern that has nothing to do with the white scorching world of AI.
Rise of GLP-1s
The Indianapolis-based drugmaker loved a large 35% enhance in its inventory worth this yr, tapping into the rise of weight reduction medication with its personal providing, tirzepatide. Lilly’s star medication, Mounjaro and Zepbound, each bundle tirzepatide, with the previous accepted to deal with Kind 2 diabetes and the latter prescribed for weight reduction or sleep apnea. Tirzepatide works by simulating two naturally-occurring intestine hormones that affect digestion, urge for food and assist the physique regulate blood sugar.
Lilly’s two scorching weight reduction medication earned the corporate greater than $10 billion within the third quarter of the yr, accounting for greater than half of its $17.6 billion in gross sales throughout the identical interval. By the tip of October, Mounjaro and Zepbound had already made the corporate $25 billion – greater than the drugmaker’s complete income in 2020.
Preserving its development going after such a landmark yr poses a problem, however Lilly is already deep into the event of a new weight loss drug in tablet kind that gives a handy various to common injections. That drug, orforglipron, is a candidate for early FDA approval, a course of that would market it in a short time.
Eli Lilly bests the competitors
As Lilly races to launch its weight reduction tablet, rival drugmaker Novo Nordisk is doing the identical. Novo Nordisk can be at the moment awaiting FDA approval for its personal oral weight reduction drug beneath the company’s new expedited course of. Each drugmakers are additionally slashing the price of their injectable weight reduction medication after the Trump administration known as on them to decrease costs.
“I’m thrilled to announce that the 2 world’s largest pharmaceutical producers, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, have agreed to supply their hottest GLP-1 weight-loss drug—I name it the fats drug, keep in mind—at drastic reductions,” Trump stated.
Whereas Eli Lilly is driving excessive on the burden loss craze this yr, Novo Nordisk isn’t having fun with the identical confidence from traders. Novo Nordisk’s worth greater than quintupled heading into final yr, however the firm’s shares fell sharply in 2025 as its first-mover benefit within the weight reduction market dissolved and compounding pharmacies took a chew out of its enterprise.
Eli Lilly wasn’t first to market, however it made up floor shortly, securing FDA approval for diabetes drug Mounjaro and its weight-management counterpart Zepbound. Eli Lilly shares have soared since these medication began hitting the market, displaying no signal of flagging.
“We’ve spent 150 years going after among the hardest-to-treat illness states—like [developing] lifesaving insulin [for diabetes], eradicating polio, revolutionizing melancholy with Prozac—and we’re nonetheless laser-focused on innovation,” Eli Lilly’s World Chief Buyer Officer Jennifer Oleksiw told Fast Company not too long ago. “However the recreation has modified. It’s not delivering medication; it’s taking that medication and including the best options, providers and content material, and making it customized, accessible and scalable.”
