David Ricks joined Eli Lilly in 1996 as a business development associate, working on mergers and acquisitions. He has successively held management positions in marketing and sales in the US, leading operations in Canada as general manager since 2005 and in China as president and general manager since 2008. In 2009 he became president of Lilly USA and in 2012 president of Lilly Bio-Medicines, the largest neuroscience, pain and immunology business unit. He was appointed CEO in January 2017 and Chairman of the Board in June 2017. Under his leadership, the company's value has grown from $70 billion to nearly $700 billion by September 2025, largely thanks to GLP-1 diabetes and obesity drugs like Mounjaro and Zepbound. Eli Lilly has achieved a 53 percent share of the global GLP-1 market by 2025 and has announced the construction of four new manufacturing plants as part of a $50 billion expansion from 2020. The company helps more than 51 million people around the world with drugs in areas such as diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's disease and cancer.[1][2][3][5]