Elon Musk, the richest person alive and the co-head of President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is doubling down on his support for expanding access to affordable GLP-1 weight-loss medications like Ozempic.
Musk said that "nothing would do more" to improve health and quality of life for Americans than low-cost GLP-1 medications
Elon Musk, the richest person alive and the co-head of President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is doubling down on his support for expanding access to affordable GLP-1 weight-loss medications like Ozempic.
GLP-1 medications are a class of drugs made popular by Novo Nordisk’s diabetes treatment, Ozempic. These drugs mimic a hormone that regulates appetite and blood sugar and have become highly sought after as treatments for obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Recent studies and clinical trials have been finding that these drugs also have health benefits beyond weight loss.
This isn’t Musk’s first time expressing his support for the use of these popular treatments. In 2022, he posted on X that he had used Wegovy.
Recently, he agreed with Sen. Bernie Sanders’s efforts to bring down the costs of expensive GLP-1 drugs.
“Solving obesity greatly reduces risk of other diseases, especially diabetes, and improves quality of life. We do need to find a way to make appetite inhibitors available to anyone who wants them,” Musk wrote in a post in September.
The remarks were made in response to a post about Sen. Sanders claiming that generic drug companies have said they can sell cheaper versions of these medications for less than $100 a month.
In the U.S., the list price — a drug’s price without health insurance — for Ozempic is $968.52 for a month’s supply. The list price of Wegovy in the U.S. is $1,349.02. The cost of these popular medications is already much cheaper in other countries. For example, Ozempic is just $59 in Germany, and Wegovy is only $92 in the U.K.
“I don’t agree with Bernie about many things, but I do on this,” Musk wrote.
Sen. Sanders grilled Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen in September during a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) regarding what the company charges in the U.S. for its blockbuster drugs.
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