Dave Ricks
Chair & CEO, Eli Lilly and Company. On 2 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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David A. Ricks has led Eli Lilly as CEO since 2017, overseeing its expansion into one of the world's most valuable pharmaceutical companies driven by blockbuster diabetes and obesity therapies like Mounjaro and Zepbound. Beyond Lilly, he serves on the board of directors of Adobe and the Purdue University Board of Trustees.
2shows
3appearances
122statements
59resolved
33supported
9contradicted
56%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Dave Ricks said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Ricks: PBM rebate incentives should be eliminated as unethical
“These PBMs and there's some group purchasing organizations like this. That should go away. And I think health is different than other commodities. It's probably has a much more important social role in deciding that the smallest, the little guy gets the worst …”
Ricks: Insurers initially refused to cover Eli Lilly's discounted generic insulin
“In the first year, no formularies covered this. So it was really only for that cash payer. No insurance company picked it up, even though it was dramatically cheaper. Now it's about half of the volume, but still half not because that model of this margin sprea…”
Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks says biotech venture capital is totally broken
“We can talk about venture and biotech in a second because it's totally broken.”
Dave Ricks: Consolidated pharmacy benefit managers make every decision for self-enrichment
“What happened is, you know, the, like any consolidated terminal state of an industry, what's the term, the in-ification of their service, is they just become so, every, every action they make is about their benefit, not the customer.”
Dave Ricks: Fully automated 'in silico' drug discovery is a long way off
“The idea that you're going to throw on, you know, turn a switch on a computer and it's going to think about something and event, you know, the next Prozac. I don't know. I think we're a long way from that day.”
Ricks: Machine-designed drugs haven't reached clinical trials yet, but are coming
“I don't know of one that's come through the machine driven discovery process, which is really machine plus human that's made it to the clinic yet, but they're coming.”
Ricks: AI won't solve biology until we understand over 50% of it
“And today, I don't know, I would estimate we might know 10 to 15% of human biology. So the machine's not going to be good at all until we get way above 50%.”
Ricks: Claude and xAI beat ChatGPT for science because references check out
“I don't use that one for science actually. It's too, too horrible.
Patrick Collison: So which one do you use for science?
Dave Ricks: I tend to use either Claude or the XAI one. I find it more terse. And more, the references actually check out more often.”
Ricks: Lilly's industry-leading R&D ROI comes from process, not picking winners
“I think one of the reasons Lilly has probably the highest return on investment in R&D in the industry is because not the picking of winners and losers, but the, actually the process by which we run it.”
Ricks: Cardiovascular trial rules added five years to diabetes drug development
“The Evandia one, we know well, we work in diabetes, actually caused a policy change, and the policy change was you must rule out cardiovascular risk prior to market entry, and as you may know some conditions like diabetes have a more continuous variable you're…”
Ricks: Expensive cardiovascular trial mandates protect GLP-1 incumbents from low-cost competition
“Now, by happy accident, we are all now really pleased with, like, incretins, like our trisepetide to run them because they frequently demonstrate massive benefit. Uncardiovascular. And in some ways, it creates a barrier to entry for the next low-cost Chinese p…”
Ricks: ICER found tirzepatide and semaglutide cost-effective at current pricing
“They just analyzed our medicines, trisepatide and semaglutide, and they said, actually, they're both cost effective at current pricing. In fact, Zepbound or Trisepatide was, the threshold they have is to save a 100,000 dollars per person per year in downstream…”
Ricks: Lilly is considering SaaS-style recurring pricing for common gene therapies
“It's conceivable that one could create like a licensing concept, stealing from the SAS model, where you say, we'll do the procedure for free. And as long as it's working for you will deposit X amount in our bank account, and you're getting the value, and we're…”
Ricks: Medicine accounts for only 10 cents of every US healthcare dollar
“In the US, the most expensive healthcare system in the world, we spend 10 cents on the dollar on medicine. The other 90 cents go through everything else that medicine's trying to prevent.”
Ricks: Lilly's net insulin price stayed near $30 despite $275 list price
“Our actual net on insulin really hasn't changed. It's like 30 or 40 dollars, but the list price got up to two 75.”
Ricks: Early-stage biotechs pitch 80% to 100% of revenue from the US
“If you fund, if you went out and said, hey, I want to back some biotechs, and they sent you their business plan, 80 to a hundred percent of the revenue in return they'll pitch you on is the US. Meaning there is no return outside the US if you start at the poin…”
Ricks: Eli Lilly's chronic knee pain study is going to work
“We have a study reading out toward the end of this year in chronic knee pain. It's going to work.”
Ricks: Taltz plus Zepbound trial is certain to boost psoriasis efficacy
“So we're doing a study with our psoriasis drug, Taltz, and ZepBound. That will read out this fall. And I'm certain we'll show a boost in efficacy with the weight loss.”
Ricks: Pharma must invest 20-25% of revenue in R&D for double-digit growth
“I have a belief that if you're not generating, to generate double digit growth in the sector, you need to invest at 20 to 25% of sales in R&D. That's sort of a good, a positive return R&D stack.”
Eli Lilly CEO: Tirzepatide surpassed Keytruda as best-selling drug ever
“And then terzepatide, which you asked how much money we're making, but in, actually in Q-two, 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.”
Dave Ricks: Poor US insurance coverage drives patients to gray market GLP-1s
“We're not used to it in the United States. Because we, one, have a, for most people, a pretty good system to subsidize some of the benefit via the insurance markets, so there's not a lot of incentive to go outside the system. That's different for these drugs, …”
Dave Ricks: Competitors cannot match our manufacturing scale without Chinese state backing
“And unless some Chinese state-owned enterprise gets in this business, it'll be very hard for others to build that out and follow.”
Dave Ricks: Chinese entities use AI to reverse-engineer and hack chemical patents
“China's getting very good at patent hacking. So what they do is they look at that chemical structure. They work backwards, sometimes driven by AI. Algorithms define chemical structures that will behave similarly, but are outside the patent scope, and they go f…”
The other half of the tape: Dave Ricks's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Chamath Palihapitiya 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
All-In 1
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dave's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ALL-INLEDGER | Chair & CEO, Eli Lilly and Company | 2 | 71 | 55% 16/29 | full record on All-In → |
 CHEEKY PINTLEDGER | Chair & CEO, Eli Lilly and Company | 1 | 51 | 57% 17/30 | full record on Cheeky Pint → |