Is Eli Lilly a trillion dollar company?

It became the first drugmaker in history to touch a $1 trillion market value on November 21, 2025, and consolidated that position after its February 4, 2026 earnings report. It has traded above and below that line through 2026. In mid-September 2026 the shares were near $1,120 and the market value near $1.0 to $1.1 trillion depending on the source.

How much money does Eli Lilly make?

Revenue was $65.2 billion in 2025, up 45% from $45.0 billion in 2024. In the first half of 2026 alone it took $42.8 billion. Full-year 2026 guidance is $85 to $87 billion.

Public shareholders. Lilly has a single class of common stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange as LLY. Lilly's Form 10-Q reported 941.7 million shares outstanding as of April 27, 2026, while its own quarterly earnings use a weighted-average diluted count near 894 million; the two are not interchangeable, so check which one a figure rests on. The largest single holder is the Lilly Endowment, a private Indianapolis foundation created in 1937, which held 90,376,978 shares, or 9.6%, as of June 30, 2026. Unlike the Novo Nordisk Foundation, it has no special voting rights.

Who is the CEO of Eli Lilly and what is he paid?

David A. Ricks has been chair, president and chief executive since January 1, 2017. His 2025 compensation package was $36.7 million, up 26% on 2024, of which $1.7 million was base salary. Lilly disclosed a CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio of 367 to 1.

How much of Eli Lilly's revenue comes from weight-loss drugs?

Mounjaro and Zepbound together were $36.5 billion in 2025, about 56% of company revenue. In the second quarter of 2026 the two brands were about 65% of revenue.

When was Eli Lilly founded?

May 10, 1876, by Colonel Eli Lilly, in a two-story building near Meridian and Pearl Streets in Indianapolis. The room used to make medicine was about 160 square feet.

Did Eli Lilly invent insulin?

No. Insulin was discovered by researchers at the University of Toronto. Lilly partnered with them and in 1923 became the first company to sell insulin commercially in the United States, under the name Iletin.

What is the biggest risk to Eli Lilly?

Concentration. Two brands containing one molecule produce most of its revenue, and the US compound patent for tirzepatide runs to 2036. That is why the company has spent tens of billions buying early-stage biotech companies since 2023.

How Eli Lilly Became the World's Most Valuable Drugmaker

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On Friday, November 21, 2025, Eli Lilly and Company briefly became worth $1 trillion. No pharmaceutical company had ever done that. No healthcare company of any kind had [1].

Eight years earlier the same company was worth about $93 billion, and a decade before that Wall Street analysts were openly asking whether it could survive as an independent business.

This is how that happened, in plain numbers.

What was Eli Lilly before all this?

An old Indiana insulin company having a bad twenty-five years.

Colonel Eli Lilly founded the business on May 10, 1876 in a two-story building near Meridian and Pearl Streets in downtown Indianapolis, with three employees and about 160 square feet of production space. It was his fifth attempt at starting a business; the first four failed [2].

In 1923, working with the University of Toronto team that had discovered insulin, Lilly became the first company to sell insulin commercially in the United States. That made diabetes survivable and made Lilly a diabetes company for the next hundred years.

Then came Prozac, launched in 1988, which by 2000 accounted for roughly a quarter of the company’s $10.8 billion in revenue. On August 9, 2000 a federal appeals court invalidated Prozac’s patent two years earlier than expected. Lilly shares fell about a third within days and kept sliding, bottoming at $29 in 2008 [3].

The decade that followed was worse. Lilly internally called 2011 to 2014 “Years YZ,” because Zyprexa, Cymbalta, Gemzar and Evista were all losing patent protection in that window. Its own 2011 annual report disclosed that seven products representing 71% of worldwide revenue had lost or would lose their principal US exclusivity. Revenue fell from $24.3 billion in 2011 to $19.6 billion in 2014 [3][4].

Analysts told Lilly to merge. Standard & Poor’s said in 2010 that “the patent cliff will kill them.” Lilly refused, cut costs and kept spending on research [3].

That refusal is why there is a tirzepatide.

When did the turn actually happen?

David Ricks became chief executive on January 1, 2017. He has said that when the early tirzepatide data arrived that year, leadership recognized what it had immediately [1].

But the decision that mattered came in 2020, and it was made before any regulator had approved anything. Lilly began committing capital to new manufacturing plants on the strength of Phase 2 data. Every manufacturing statistic the company publishes today is measured “since 2020” from that choice. Had the Phase 3 data disappointed, Lilly would have built factories for a drug that did not work.

The FDA approved Mounjaro for type 2 diabetes on May 13, 2022 and Zepbound for chronic weight management on November 8, 2023.

What do the numbers actually look like?

Year	Revenue	Year-end market value (approximate)
2017	about $22.9 billion	about $93 billion
2018	about $22.3 billion	about $122 billion
2019	about $22.3 billion	about $126 billion
2020	about $24.5 billion	about $162 billion
2021	$28.3 billion	about $264 billion
2022	$28.5 billion	about $348 billion
2023	$34.1 billion	about $553 billion
2024	$45.0 billion	about $704 billion
2025	$65.2 billion	about $962 billion

Revenue figures for 2021 onward come from Lilly’s reported results; earlier years come from third-party compilations and are approximate, partly because the 2018-2019 separation of the Elanco animal health business changed how earlier years are restated. Market values are approximate and vary by source [4][5].

Look at 2022. Revenue was flat. Mounjaro had only just been approved. And the market value still rose about 32%, because investors had read the same data Lilly had.

The 2025 numbers are the ones that broke records. Revenue of $65.2 billion, up 45%. Reported diluted earnings per share of $22.95, up 96%. Mounjaro at $23.0 billion, up 99%. Zepbound at $13.5 billion, up 175%. Research and development spending of $13.3 billion, 20.5% of sales [6].

2026 has been faster still. First-quarter revenue was $19.8 billion, up 56%. Second-quarter revenue was $23.0 billion, up 48%, with Mounjaro at $9.94 billion and Zepbound at $4.93 billion. Lilly has raised its full-year guidance twice, from $80-83 billion at the start of the year to $85-87 billion in August [7].

Here is the detail most coverage skips: this growth is not price. In the second quarter of 2026, Lilly’s globally realized prices fell 13%, and outside the United States they fell 36%, largely because Mounjaro joined China’s national reimbursement list in January. Volume grew 60% globally and 113% internationally. The company is selling far more at meaningfully lower prices [7].

Who owns the company?

Public shareholders, through a single class of common stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange as LLY. Two share counts circulate and they are not the same thing: Lilly’s Form 10-Q cover page reported 941,741,406 shares outstanding as of April 27, 2026, which is the number the Lilly Endowment’s SEC filing uses to compute its stake, while Lilly’s Q2 2026 earnings release reports 893,671 thousand weighted-average diluted shares and its 2026 guidance assumes about 894 million.

The largest single holder is the Lilly Endowment, a private Indianapolis foundation created in 1937 by J.K. Lilly Sr. and his sons through gifts of company stock. It held 90,376,978 shares, about 9.6%, as of June 30, 2026 [8].

This is worth dwelling on, because it is the opposite of how Novo Nordisk is set up. The Novo Nordisk Foundation controls its company through a dual-class structure that gives it a majority of voting rights it is legally barred from selling. The Lilly Endowment has no such power. It is a large shareholder with ordinary shares, legally and operationally separate from the company, with its own board, staff and offices.

What it does have is extraordinary concentration. Its quarterly filings show a single holding: Eli Lilly stock, worth about $108 billion at the end of June 2026, up from $84.5 billion three months earlier. Pensions & Investments flagged the risk in June 2026: a foundation whose entire portfolio is one company that depends on one molecule [9]. The Endowment funds education, community development and religion, with a long-standing commitment to Indianapolis.

What is the chief executive paid?

David Ricks received $36.7 million for 2025, up 26% from $29.2 million in 2024 and $26.6 million in 2023. The package was $23.3 million in stock awards, a $6.8 million bonus, $1.7 million in base salary and a $4.5 million increase in pension value [10].

Lilly justified it in the proxy statement by pointing to revenue growth of about 207% and a five-year total shareholder return of 571% since Ricks took over. The company also disclosed that it raised his annual cash bonus target from 150% to 175% in 2025 to “maintain market competitiveness” [10].

The disclosed CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio was 367 to 1. At the annual meeting on May 4, 2026 shareholders approved the package on an advisory basis, with 731,998,717 votes for and 30,467,278 against, about 96% of the votes cast either way [16]. Lilly’s next-highest-paid executive was chief scientific officer Daniel Skovronsky at $17.8 million.

Ricks is 58, holds a bachelor’s degree from Purdue and an MBA from Indiana University, and has spent more than 25 years at Lilly, including running Lilly Canada, Lilly China and Lilly USA. He also chairs the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

What does this mean for Indianapolis?

A great deal, and the state has the study to prove it.

An Indiana University Business Research Center analysis released alongside Lilly’s 150th anniversary in May 2026 found that the company’s direct operations contribute nearly $15.6 billion to Indiana’s gross domestic product, about 2.7% of the state’s total economic output, and that every direct Lilly job supports 2.17 jobs with other Indiana employers [12].

Lilly employs nearly 15,000 people in Indiana, including 13,583 in Indianapolis, and accounts for roughly 70% of the state’s pharmaceutical GDP. Its LEAP District buildout in Lebanon supports an average of about 9,470 jobs a year during construction, peaking at an estimated 18,630 in 2026. Once fully operational, the study projects Lilly’s total Indiana employment footprint at about 52,400 jobs by 2030 [12].

These are modeled estimates, not counts, and they were produced in connection with a company anniversary. But they explain why three governors turned up to the 150th anniversary ceremony on May 12, 2026, why Peyton Manning emceed it, and why the mayor of Indianapolis declared an “Eli Lilly and Company Week” [13].

The relationship has friction too. The LEAP District needs enormous amounts of water and power. Citizens Energy Group and Lebanon Utilities are building infrastructure to supply up to 25 million gallons a day, and a planned wastewater discharge site at Eagle Creek on the northwest side of Indianapolis was dropped in 2026 after months of public opposition. Indiana’s incentive package for the Lilly projects has been reported at up to $1.7 billion, the largest in state history.

What is the risk?

One molecule.

Mounjaro and Zepbound were about 56% of 2025 revenue and roughly 65% of second-quarter 2026 revenue. Lilly’s own annual report states that anti-obesity medicines comprise a significant portion of revenues [14].

That is a heavier single-product dependence than almost any large drugmaker has carried. The 2011 patent cliff, which nearly ended Lilly’s independence, spread 71% of revenue across seven different products. Today’s concentration sits in one compound sold under two names.

The US compound patent for tirzepatide runs to 2036, with 2037 in major European countries, 2040 in Japan and US data protection to 2027 [14]. That is a longer runway than semaglutide has, and it is one reason analysts model Lilly’s franchise further into the 2030s than Novo Nordisk’s.

Lilly’s answer to the concentration question is the acquisition spree. It completed ten acquisitions in the first nine months of 2026 alone, after three in 2025 and two in 2024, committing more than $25 billion of business development spending in the first half of 2026: Orna, Centessa, Kelonia, Ajax, three infectious disease companies in a single day, AtaiBeckley and Merida. Almost none of them has an approved product.

Those deals show up in the accounts as acquired in-process research and development charges, $2.78 billion in the second quarter of 2026 alone, which depress reported earnings. Optimists call that pipeline building. Skeptics call it buying at the top. Neither reading will be settled for a decade.

What comes next?

Lilly reports third-quarter results on October 29, 2026. The questions on that call will be the ones that have run through all of 2026: whether Foundayo’s launch accelerates, whether international volume keeps outrunning falling prices, and whether retatrutide stays on track for a first-quarter 2027 filing.

At the 150th anniversary ceremony in May, Ricks put it in a way worth keeping: “This may be the beginning of the biggest sustained upswing in our history. It might also be just another peak in a series of peaks and valleys. We don’t get to know which, but we do get to choose how it happens, and right now, we’re choosing to reinvest in science like we never have before” [13].

This article reports financial facts. It is not investment advice, and nothing here is guidance about whether to take any medicine. Questions about treatment belong with a healthcare provider.

Sources

This article summarizes FDA labeling, published research and company information current as of September 14, 2026. It is not medical advice and does not replace a conversation with your own healthcare provider. How we research and verify.