In May 1972, Ken Langone took over a tiny medical device company in San Diego through a proxy fight. The company had a market capitalization of $1.5 million. In Nov. 1977, Eli Lilly acquired it for $50 million in Lilly stock.
That is how the 91-year-old billionaire and Home Depot co-founder came to appear on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Sept. 22, expressing the quiet confidence of someone who has watched that $50 million compound for nearly 50 years.
I think Lilly's going to be a $2,000 stock in the next 3 or 4 years.
From its current price at $1,150, that target would require a 74% gain. Langone said he has never sold a single Lilly share. He has seen the stock cut to an eight multiple and a 7% yield. He bought more.
He has seen it drop 20% in a single day. He kept buying, to the point that, on a golf course at Oakmont with investor Stanley Druckenmiller, his trader kept purchasing shares until Langone realized he owned more stock than he had cash to cover.
“I had a crisis,” Langone said in the “Squawk Box” interview. “But those are those two occasions.”
Fast forward to today, and LLY trades at $1,150.99 with a $1.026 trillion market capitalization, up 55.06% over the past year, according to Yahoo Finance.
Also Read: Eli Lilly Latest News and Stories
How Langone developed his conviction: what he saw in Lilly
The 1977 acquisition gave Langone Lilly stock. And what it gave him next was something more valuable: access to management.
“I met the management of Lilly, and all of a sudden it dawned on me: These are good people,” Langone told “Squawk Box.”
More Healthcare Stocks:
- BofA sees Eli Lilly’s overseas obesity sales topping the U.S.
- Eli Lilly’s Foundayo pill wins first European approval
- Novo Nordisk CEO resets expectations for Wegovy’s growth
That observation — not a financial model, not a DCF — drove the position that grew into one of the most successful long-term holds in American investing history.
Langone specifically praised current CEO David Ricks and R&D Head Dan Skovronsky, calling them a “home run” leadership team.
He noted that Lilly made eight or nine acquisitions of $1 billion or more in 2026 alone. Langone specifically called out the diversification push as evidence that the company is “not relying completely on these weight-loss drugs” but “building a fortress for activities in so many other different areas.”
That diversification includes Kisunla for Alzheimer’s disease, Ebglyss for immunology, Jaypirca for oncology, and a pipeline of next-generation metabolic treatments.
Lilly’s ability to move from diabetes drugs to obesity to neuroscience to oncology with commercially successful products is the compounding moat Langone has been watching build for nearly five decades.
Lilly’s business case behind Langone’s $2,000 share price target
Langone’s conviction is grounded in a business that has demonstrated that it can execute at an extraordinary scale.
Q2 fiscal 2026 total revenue was $23 billion, up 48% year over year, driven primarily by volume of Mounjaro and Zepbound, according to Lilly’s Q2 earnings release. Full-year 2025 revenues were $65.2 billion, up 45%, Lilly reported.
Ricks said one-third of all new oral GLP-1 patients are now choosing Foundayo, Lilly’s once-daily oral GLP-1 pill, as I reported on Sept. 22.
Related: Eli Lilly CEO reveals astonishing shift in GLP-1 pill market
Medicare coverage of obesity drugs, which began in July, opens tens of millions of newly insured patients to the category.
The $6.5 billion manufacturing facility under construction in Houston will produce Foundayo and small-molecule medicines across multiple therapeutic areas when it opens in 2030.
Since 2020, Lilly has committed more than $50 billion to manufacturing expansion, TheStreet reported. That is the infrastructure behind the supply that matches the demand.
I noted that of the 22 analysts who rated LLY over the past three months, 20 recommended buy, one recommended hold, and one recommended sell. The consensus reflects the same conviction Langone has held personally for 49 years, just with a lot less history behind it.
What a $2,000 Lilly share price would require
Time to play with the numbers. From $1,150, a $2,000 Lilly stock price implies a 74% gain over three to four years. That is between 14.84% and 20.26% annualized.
That’s a pace the stock has exceeded over virtually every meaningful lookback period Langone has experienced.
The five-year return on LLY is 418.75%, according to Yahoo Finance. The three-year return is 113.42%. The one-year return is 55.06%.
Langone’s $2,000 target requires only meaningful, not exceptional, compounding of the earnings trajectory already visible in the forward pipeline.
The risks are present, too. Patent expiration dynamics, generic and biosimilar competition for semaglutide, regulatory pricing pressure, and the always-present possibility that a better drug displaces the current generation of GLP-1 therapies.
Langone has lived through drug disasters and management missteps at Lilly before. He loaded up every time.
“Look at it today,” he said on “Squawk Box.”
For a legend who has held the stock since Jimmy Carter was president, that might be the most efficient investment thesis ever delivered.
Related: Obesity titan could shake up Lilly and Novo after astonishing trial