MW Is GLP-1 the new AI? Drugmaker Eli Lilly briefly joined the $1 trillion market cap club.
By Jaimy Lee
The milestone is the result of the drugmaker's calculated strategy to dominate the market for obesity medications
Eli Lilly briefly crossed the $1 trillion market cap threshold, the first drug maker to ever reach that milestone.
Eli Lilly is the first pharmaceutical stock to hit a $1 trillion valuation, even if it was only for a couple minutes, driven by its methodical approach to capturing an obesity drug market that didn't exist five years ago.
The Indianapolis drug giant's stock $(LLY)$ reached an intraday high of $1,061.17 in morning trading Friday, which was above the threshold of $1,057.78 needed for Lilly to become the 10th U.S. company with a $1 trillion market capitalization. It's the only health care company that has made the cut.
The only other non-technology member of the club is Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway $(BRK.B)$, which currently sits in ninth place. One could argue, however, that two other tech companies also in the club - Nvidia (NVDA) and Amazon (AMZN) - are increasingly recognized for their work in drug development and medical services, respectively.
The stock has pared some gains to be up 0.8% in recent morning trading, with the market cap at $993.7 billion.
Lilly's rise is one to study. The drugmaker has long been one of the top pharmaceutical players, bringing Prozac to the masses in the 1990s as well as the insulin Humulin a decade earlier. Five years ago, its stock was about $145.
But then came tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Mounjaro and Zepbound that dramatically changed the company's fortunes. The FDA approved Mounjaro in 2022 for Type 2 diabetes and Zepbound for obesity the following year. At that time, Novo Nordisk (DK:NOVO.B), which has a competing GLP-1 duo for the same conditions, was far ahead of Lilly.
That has since reversed. While Lilly's stock hit record highs in most of November, Novo's shares have tumbled 68% since its record close of $146.91 on June 25, 2024.
Read: Why cutting drug prices is pushing Eli Lilly's stock to all-time highs.
That's because Lilly's approach to deals of all kinds, including acquisitions, licensing, telehealth, manufacturing and those with the Trump administration, set it apart from Novo, which is now undergoing a major restructuring under a new CEO. By Aug. 8, 2023, Lilly's stock hit $521.60 after a record quarter for Mounjaro and new data for Novo's Wegovy that showed GLP-1s can also produce a slew of cardiovascular benefits in addition to weight loss.
Since then, Lilly's market cap has doubled. (See below for a table of Lilly's market-cap milestones.)
Lilly is winning with its diverse pipeline of novel drugs, promising tirzepatide combinations and an exciting obesity pill in development in addition to its work on aging-related conditions like wet age-related macular degeneration and Alzheimer's disease, for which it sells a new treatment called Kisunla.
Its stock is up 35% so far this year, and there could be more to come. The FDA is expected to decide in the first quarter of next year whether to approve orforglipron, Lilly's experimental GLP-1 pill and what could be the first oral GLP-1 medicine for obesity. Jefferies analysts predict that orforglipron could eventually bring in $25 billion in annual sales.
Here's when Lilly reached its market cap milestones:
Market cap milestone Date $50 billion Feb. 12, 1997 $100 billion Jan. 28, 1999 $200 billion Jan. 25, 2021 $300 billion June 24, 2022 $400 billion May 3, 2023 $500 billion Aug. 11, 2023 $600 billion Jan. 11, 2024 $700 billion Feb. 9, 2024 $800 billion June 7, 2024 $900 billion July 12, 2024 $1 trillion Nov. 21, 2025 Source: FactSet
-Jaimy Lee
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November 21, 2025 10:40 ET (15:40 GMT)
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