Monster of the Week: David Ricks
Meet David Ricks, multi-millionaire CEO of Eli Lilly.
Eli Lilly is known for insulin, along with blockbuster obesity drugs like Mounjaro and Zepbound.
Ricks has spent years rising through Lilly’s corporate management machine. Now he runs a Big Pharma juggernaut that made $20.64 billion in profit last year. He’s a high achiever when it comes to extorting working people for life-saving medicine.
And he has been rewarded for it. In 2025, Ricks’ pay jumped 25.7% to $36.7 million, which is likely to make him the highest-paid CEO in Big Pharma.
Meanwhile, in Indiana, 1 in 13 people were uninsured in 2024. About one in five Indiana households had medical debt in collections totaling more than $2 billion.
Eli Lilly spent years under fire for charging sky-high prices for insulin — as much as $900 a month — forcing many patients to ration the life-saving drug. Lilly did not make major list-price cuts until they were forced to in 2023, after mass outrage and lawsuits from multiple states alleging a price-fixing scheme that inflated insulin by 1,000 percent. Ricks oversaw all of it.
Ricks has held onto his position partly by buying off politicians. He has given thousands to Indiana Governor Mike Braun. He gave $25,000 to Committed to America, Mike Pence’s presidential super PAC. He also gave $30,000 to Mitch McConnell, who attacked Medicare drug-price negotiation as “socialist price controls.”
As Trump returned to power, Ricks worked to make himself one of the administration’s favored pharmaceutical executives. Eli Lilly gave $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund. Ricks joined other drug industry leaders at Mar-a-Lago after Trump’s reelection. Trump publicly called him “a friend of mine.”
Ricks is one of a posse of corporate executives like Blackstone co-founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman and GEO Group founder George Zoley, who have extraordinarily close relationships with Trump. David Ricks personally lobbied Trump to stop Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices, and received expedited FDA approval for Lilly’s weight loss drugs.
One pharmaceutical lobbyist said Ricks “really went out of his way to be the Trump guy.”
But Ricks doesn’t discriminate. He also showers money on Democrats, including Indiana’s blobbish former Senator Joe Donnelly, and Democrats’ failed two-time gubernatorial candidate John Gregg.
Both parties protect wealthy criminals like David Ricks. But price-gouging companies like Eli Lilly shouldn’t exist, and David Ricks should be in prison. We need to nationalize Big Pharma and make life-saving medicines like insulin free.