Inside the GLP-1 Gold Rush: Eli Lilly CEO on New Breakthroughs, Addiction & Mental Health, Pricing
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Who is Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks and what is his vision for the company?
GLP-1 drugs have become increasingly popular. Eli Lilly coming to save us here.
Has had its market capitalization increase by about 860% since he became CEO. And the stock price is up a little bit more than 1,000%. No need for needles. Eli Lilly says it has a pill. Eli Lilly's experimental pill appears to work as well as the injected drug. It's everyone's job to move the science. We should always be pushing forward. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Eli Lilly's CEO, Dave Ricks.
Hi, David. Good to see you. Good to see you. All right. How are you? Dave. All right. You want to say thank you? What's happening? What's
happening? Dave. Yes. I don't want to make it awkward. But we were sitting here three years ago on this pod, and Chamath was calling me a fat bastard. He wasn't wrong. I was 213 pounds. I'm a Svelte 172 right now. Awesome. And it's because of what you've done. Thank you. Can I give you a hug? You can, yeah.
Bring it in here.
I appreciate it. Congratulations. Also, Sax lost 20 pounds, so together we've lost a Friedberg. Good, Sax. Give him a hug. Come on. Nice. Nice. How much money are you guys printing? My lord. What do you do with it? You have real barrels? What do you do with all of
it? Can I please start?
Yes,
go ahead. I got
four more jokes. I'll get them in the end.
I mean, you really have built one of the most incredible business in America, but you've done it because you took an enormous bet long time ago. Yeah. Do you want to talk us through the journey and the process you had to go through and what you saw early on and how you made the bet on this class of drug?
Yeah, great, and thanks for having me here. I'm trying to up my cool factor. That's what they tell me in the Midwest I need to do. Did you get a Tomas Ford suit as well? No, I'm actually disappointed
in
the tie. I don't know, that's not... No, you and I are similar. Farmer guy wears ties. Dave,
Suitsupply does a great job.
Just own it. Okay, there we
go, just donate.
Okay, so yeah, GLP-1 drugs, we all know about it. It feels like an overnight success, but what happened? You know, drug development is hard and long and requires a fair amount of failure and discipline, a huge amount of capital. So actually in 2006, we launched the first GLP-1 drug. Nobody really knew the name of it. It was a twice-a-day injection for diabetes. But the cover of our annual report in 2007 had a lady on it, and she said, there's a quote, it says, my diabetes is under control and I'm losing a little bit of weight.
How did Eli Lilly discover the weight‑loss impact of GLP‑1 drugs and what were the early challenges?
So that was 18 years ago. I mean, and since that time, we're now, we've been inventing new versions of that, solving various problems with that twice a day. We wanted to make it more convenient, needed to get the dose up, and people tended to lose weight, more weight when you got the dose up. And then Terzepatide, which you asked how much money we're making, but actually in Q2, we reported global sales, which surpassed Keytruda to becoming the best-selling drug in the world, actually the best-selling drug in the world of all time. in Q2 this year. How much did it make in Q2? $8.1 billion in revenue and growing at 80%. And how
many people are on a GLP-1 globally
now? I'd estimate around 20 million take prescription GLP-1s. Some unknown amount of people take non-prescription. That would
be compounding?
Compounded or... Synthetic? Yeah, or just not for human use. We can talk about all that. So anyway, 2014 comes along. Four scientists at Lilly decided to combine GLP-1 with another peptide that your stomach produces when you eat that's appetite suppressing. They made the single molecule called Terzepatide. That's what's Manjaro now. But that happened in 2014. 2016, I was named a CEO and I got a call that fall and one of our chief scientists called me and said, hey, we have to stop an early phase study for Terzepatide. That's usually a bad call. So I'm like, oh, like this is the follow-up to our second-gen version of the GLP-1. He said, no, no, it's actually good news. We were running this study in Singapore with healthy male volunteers.
You can imagine what a healthy male Singaporean looks like at baseline, right?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks and what is his vision for the company?
0:01–2:54
2
How did Eli Lilly discover the weight‑loss impact of GLP‑1 drugs and what were the early challenges?
2:54–7:01
3
What is the current pricing strategy for GLP‑1 therapies and how is capital allocated after a blockbuster launch?
7:01–10:44
4
Why have biotech venture‑capital investments plummeted and how is “patent hacking” in China affecting the industry?
10:44–15:00
5
What does Dave Ricks do for his personal health – sleep, movement, diet, relationships, and reading?
15:00–18:12
6
What unexpected benefits do GLP‑1 drugs have for addiction and mental‑health treatment?
18:12–22:25
7
How does Big Pharma influence media, and how is AI empowering patients in healthcare?
22:25–26:00
8
What are the implications of proposed NIH budget cuts, the PBM “boogeyman,” and what’s the next major pharma breakthrough?
26:00–30:35
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