Everyone Thinks the Eli Lilly Story Is Played Out. Cramer Thinks They’re Dead Wrong

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Drug stocks got hit hard on Monday in what Jim Cramer called a “vicious rotation,” and the selloff looked like the usual crowded-trade unwind. Investors decided the Mounjaro story was played out. On Tuesday morning’s Mad Dash, Cramer walked through why he thinks that reading is wrong, and he had a fresh JPMorgan note flagging “potential upside from Mounjaro international” and U.S. obesity-market growth “much higher than people think” to lean on.

Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY) closed Monday at $1,200.06 and was rallying 2.63% on Tuesday as Cramer defended it.

Why the Crowd Thinks It’s Over

The played-out thesis has surface merit. Lilly is a $1.16 trillion market cap trading at 44x trailing earnings and 33x forward, the stock has run 59% in the past year, and realized prices on Mounjaro and Zepbound went down 13% last quarter as rebates and market-access deals bit into gross margin.

Reddit sentiment turned bearish from late June onward, with retail chatter dominated by presidential-stock-promotion drama and a “weight loss race” framing that has Novo Nordisk asking suppliers for discounts to try to regain share. So the story going into August is that the easy money has been made, generic GLP-1 competition is coming, and pricing goes only one way from here.

Cramer’s Three-Part Bull Case

Cramer’s rebuttal is a runway argument in three parts. First, most of the world isn’t on these drugs yet. The numbers back it. Mounjaro did $8.66 billion in Q1 2026, up 125% year over year, with international revenue growing 81% as China added it to the National Reimbursed Drug List. When you pair a doubling in volume with fresh reimbursement in the world’s second-largest economy, you get a curve that looks nothing like a mature product.

Second, the pill. Cramer called an oral formulation “radical.” The FDA already approved Foundayo (orforglipron), the only GLP-1 pill that can be taken any time of day without food or water restrictions, and it beat oral semaglutide head to head in The Lancet. Every needle-averse patient, every emerging-market pharmacy without cold-chain distribution, every employer benefits manager choking on injectable pricing suddenly becomes addressable. The GLP-1 total addressable market expands the moment the pill hits shelves.

Third, muscle-sparing. Cramer called losing fat without losing muscle the “holy grail” of the category, and he is right that it is the differentiator that matters for the second wave. Retatrutide, Lilly’s next-gen triple agonist, delivered weight loss up to 71.2 lbs with osteoarthritis pain relief in prior trials. If you are the doctor writing scripts three years from now, you write the one that keeps the patient strong.

The August Earnings Catalyst and the Setup Risk

Lilly reports again in the first week of August. The setup is straightforward. Management already raised 2026 guidance to $82.0 to $85.0 billion in revenue and $35.50 to $37.00 in non-GAAP EPS, and the company has beaten estimates four straight quarters, including a 25.88% EPS beat last quarter (see the Q1 2026 8-K). Cramer’s read of the JPMorgan note is that it is the first analyst signal of a positive surprise coming.

The risk is exactly what makes the bull case attractive. A stock trading at a full multiple, up double digits into the earnings report, needs the international ramp and the Foundayo launch numbers to actually land. If oral scripts start slower than the Street models, or if Novo’s rebate war compresses net pricing again, the reaction is asymmetric to the downside. Cramer is likely right that “played out” is the wrong frame for a company still adding countries, formulations, and mechanisms. Whether he is right about the next four weeks is a separate question, and the answer arrives in early August.

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