GLP-1 prescriptions reached 2.5 million a month before Musk's 2022 Wegovy post
IQVIA ties a viral 2022 post to a sharp jump in GLP-1 prescribing, but its own data also credit new drugs and a tripling of advertising spending.
Before Elon Musk said on Twitter in October 2022 that he used Wegovy (semaglutide) to look "fit and healthy," GLP-1 medications had collectively reached about 2.5 million prescriptions a month in the United States, according to an IQVIA analysis of the market [1]. Over the following year, prescription volume more than doubled, and by the end of 2024 it had surpassed 9 million, the health data firm reported [1].
The account comes from an IQVIA blog published September 23, 2025, by Luke Greenwalt and Ruthy Glass [1]. The Musk post landed four months after Eli Lilly launched Mounjaro (tirzepatide), a drug for type 2 diabetes that was also prescribed for weight loss [1]. IQVIA calls the post — and a later 2024 tweet in which Musk said he was taking Mounjaro — a "pivotal moment" that sparked widespread curiosity about the drugs [1].
IQVIA does not credit the posts alone. Promotional spending on GLP-1 drugs was $1.8 billion in the month before Mounjaro's launch, and it reached more than $7 billion across the class by mid-2025 [1]. The firm also reports that the number of unique patients on GLP-1 therapy rose 200 percent in the 12 months after Mounjaro's launch [1]. As of the second quarter of 2025, 11 million unique patients were using a GLP-1 across all indications, which include diabetes and obesity [1].
The starting point was small. Before 2022, only 1.8 percent of patients diagnosed with obesity — about 1.6 million people — had begun any anti-obesity treatment [1]. IQVIA also tracked a rise in online attention: between August 2021 and July 2024, social media mentions of obesity treatment brands passed 1.4 million, a 740 percent increase compared with the preceding three-year period, and there were 53 million searches for obesity as a disease over the same window [1].
How much of the growth came from Musk's posts rather than from the launch of Mounjaro or the advertising campaigns IQVIA also describes has not been separated out in the firm's analysis [1]. The 2.5 million monthly figure covers all GLP-1 drugs and all indications, not weight loss alone, and IQVIA's blog does not give prescription totals for individual brands such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, or Zepbound [1].
Why it matters for patients
The numbers describe a category that went from a narrow corner of medicine to one of the largest drug classes in the country in about two years [1]. IQVIA notes that the surge "stressed supply chains" and led payers worldwide to question whether they could pay for obesity treatment [1]. For patients, that means the availability of a prescription and the price attached to it have been shaped by demand that grew faster than the systems around it.
Access to prescribers changed too. At 12 months after launch, Mounjaro and Zepbound had amassed four times as many unique prescribers as Ozempic and Wegovy had, according to IQVIA [1]. Three years after launch, Mounjaro was prescribed to an average of 9 patients per provider, and Zepbound to 7 patients per provider 18 months after its launch [1]. More clinicians writing these prescriptions means a patient is likelier to encounter a doctor familiar with them, though IQVIA's data do not cover whether a given patient's insurance will cover the cost or what a visit looks like in practice [1].
Even after the growth, IQVIA describes the treated population as "a small segment" of people diagnosed with obesity, leaving "a lot of room to grow" [1]. The blog does not project future prescription volumes, does not report how many of these prescriptions were new starts versus refills, and does not address side effects, dosing, or clinical outcomes [1].
Sources
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