His Bet On Home Depot Made Ken Langone A Billionaire. Now He Sees Eli Lilly Stock Hitting $2,000
Ken Langone built a fortune betting on Home Depot decades before anyone called it a sure thing, and now he says another stock in his portfolio is giving it a serious run for the top spot.
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Ken Langone, chairman and president of Invemed Associates and a co-founder of Home Depot (NYSE:HD | HD Price Prediction), used a CNBC Squawk Box appearance on September 22, 2026 to say that his Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY) position is now pushing his Home Depot stake for top billing in his portfolio. Langone said, “I think Lilly’s going to be a $2,000 stock in the next 3 or 4 years.”
On the portfolio race itself, Langone said, “Lilly’s come along pretty good, and it’s given Home Depot a real run. For whose first place in my portfolio.” The arithmetic behind that comment runs in both directions, and our own market data shows why.
Target and Current Price, Side By Side
Eli Lilly traded at $1,153.83 as of 13:10 UTC on September 22, 2026, a premarket quote. Langone’s stated destination is $2,000, on a horizon of three or four years. Those are the two numbers. The distance between them is for the reader to weigh.
The call also arrives after a pullback. Lilly is up 54.41% over one year and 428.77% over five years, but down 8.09% over the past month. Langone is not making the prediction at a fresh high.
Why Home Depot Is Getting a “Real Run”
Home Depot traded at $301.79 as of 13:10 UTC on September 22, 2026, also premarket. The stock is down 25.33% over one year, down 10.38% year to date, and up 2.01% over five years. Set that beside Lilly’s one-year figure and Langone’s comment about a portfolio race lines up with the price action.
Recent price action, though, says nothing about the decades of compounding that built Langone’s Home Depot stake in the first place. The segment noted that $1,000 invested at Home Depot’s IPO would be worth $16 million today, and framed Home Depot as the highest-returning S&P 500 name over 45 years. Our Home Depot price history begins in November 1999, so we could not independently verify either claim. Stories like that are the ones most investors only recognize in hindsight, which is why we studied a batch of recent runners in a free report on the winners most people already missed.
Langone’s Real Bet: Management and Research
Langone framed Lilly as a research and diversification story. “They’re not relying completely on these weight loss drugs. They’re building a fortress for activities in so many other different areas,” he said. That direction is consistent with the company’s profile, which spans immunology, oncology and neuroscience alongside the incretin franchise anchored by Mounjaro and Zepbound, plus an active business development program. Langone characterized the company as making eight or nine acquisitions of a billion dollars or more, a count we did not independently verify.
On research spending, Langone credited John Lechleiter, a former chief executive of the company, saying: “When John took over, Lilly’s pipeline was empty. There was nothing there. John said to me, Ken, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure we don’t cut research.” He then referenced $4 billion a year at the time being discussed and $17 or $18 billion in R&D this year, according to Invemed Associates. The larger figure is his characterization of the current year only.
How Langone Got Here
Per the segment, Langone acquired a San Diego medical device company for $1.5 million in 1972 and sold it to Eli Lilly five years later for $50 million in stock. He said he has watched Lilly go from roughly $2 billion in market capitalization in the late 1970s to over a trillion today, according to Invemed Associates. Our own data confirms the current figure, with Lilly’s market capitalization at $1,038,332,855,731.
Current leadership has been leaning into that build-out. Lilly disclosed the Houston project as one of ten U.S. manufacturing sites announced since 2020, and the company’s Q2 2026 filing raised full-year revenue guidance to $85.0 billion to $87.0 billion. Langone’s $2,000 call rests on that direction continuing, on a stock that has just pulled back.
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AJ spent 10 years writing about financial markets at The Motley Fool. His coverage centers on technology stocks and the broader macroeconomic trends, from interest rates to geopolitics, that shape where markets are headed next. AJ is drawn to the stories where big-picture economics and individual companies collide.
