On Friday, November 21, 2025, a pharmaceutical company from Indianapolis quietly achieved something that only a handful of corporations in history have ever done: its market capitalization pierced the $1 trillion mark for the first time, closing the day at $1.002 trillion. The name on the marquee wasn’t Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, or Meta. It was Eli Lilly & Company — a 149-year-old drugmaker that most people still associate with insulin rather than moon-shot valuations.
The catalyst was simple but explosive: Mounjaro (tirzepatide) for type-2 diabetes and its twin Zepbound for chronic weight management have become the fastest-launching blockbuster medicines in pharmaceutical history. In the third quarter of 2025 alone, the two drugs generated $7.78 billion in combined revenue — more than the entire quarterly sales of many Fortune 500 companies.
Year-to-date through September, the pair had already pulled in $19.4 billion, putting Lilly on pace to exceed $28 billion for the full year from tirzepatide alone. For context, the previous record for the fastest drug to $10 billion in annual sales belonged to Keytruda (Merck), which needed six years. Mounjaro/Zepbound did it in under three.
That performance has turned Lilly into the undisputed king of the GLP-1 category, overtaking long-time rival Novo Nordisk.
While Novo’s Ozempic and Wegovy remain cultural phenomena, Lilly now commands roughly 56% of new-to-brand prescriptions in the U.S. and has pulled ahead in global revenue for the segment in Q3. Supply constraints that once hampered both companies are easing: Lilly has invested more than $20 billion since 2022 in new manufacturing sites across Indiana, North Carolina, Germany, Ireland, and Spain, with several facilities already online and others slated for 2026–2027.
The valuation milestone places Lilly in extremely rare air. Among non-technology companies, only Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has ever sustained a trillion-dollar market cap (it first touched the mark in August 2024). Lilly now sits as the 8th most valuable company on Earth, nestled between Nvidia ($3.4T) and Tesla ($1.1T), but with a fundamentally different story: it sells molecules that millions of patients inject weekly, not chips or chatbots.
Investors are rewarding that tangibility. While many AI-related names trade at 40–60× forward earnings amid questions about when (or whether) today’s massive capex will translate into profits, Lilly is priced at roughly 38× 2026 consensus EPS — expensive for a pharma stock, but backed by a visible, compounding revenue stream that analysts expect to grow at 30–35% annually through at least 2030.
Wall Street currently forecasts $46 billion in total company revenue for 2026, with tirzepatide potentially contributing two-thirds of that figure.
The pipeline behind the blockbuster is equally reassuring. Oral GLP-1 candidate orforglipron is in Phase 3 and could reach market as early as 2027, offering a daily pill alternative that analysts believe could add another $15–20 billion in peak sales. Triple-agonist retatrutide (GLP-1/GIP/glucagon) posted unprecedented 24.2% mean weight loss at 48 weeks in mid-stage trials — results that sent ripples through the obesity community and helped fuel the latest leg of the stock’s 470% five-year rally.
Perhaps most telling is the timing. Lilly’s coronation as a trillion-dollar company arrives just as skepticism about the AI trade has begun to surface. After two years of breathless hype, investors are starting to ask harder questions about return on the hundreds of billions being poured into GPUs and data centers. Meanwhile, the global addressable market for GLP-1 therapies keeps expanding: an estimated 180 million Americans alone qualify for obesity treatment under current labels, and penetration remains below 5%. Add in international rollout, cardiovascular and sleep-apnea indications, and eventual generic/biosimilar erosion that is still a decade away, and Lilly’s growth runway looks remarkably concrete.
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In an era when “story stocks” can soar and crater on a single earnings call, Eli Lilly has delivered something increasingly scarce: a trillion-dollar business built on products patients line up for at 3 a.m. to secure. Artificial intelligence may reshape civilization, but the desire to lose weight — and the willingness to pay for it — appears, for now, to be the more bankable megatrend.
Author: Slava Vasipenok
Founder and CEO of QUASA (quasa.io) — the world's first remote work platform with payments in cryptocurrency.
Innovative entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in IT, fintech, and blockchain. Specializes in decentralized solutions for freelancing, helping to overcome the barriers of traditional finance, especially in developing regions.
