What if you bought Gilead in 1995?
US Health · Biotech. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play100.0× · S&P 500 same money: $14,783
$1,000 in Gilead at the start of 1995 would be worth about $100,000 today — 100.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Gilead started as a small antiviral specialist and became the leading HIV drug company of the 2000s, with Viread, Truvada and the once-a-day combination pill Atripla. The shares, after a dip in the early 2000s, rose more than tenfold in a decade. Its defining bet came in 2011, when it paid around $11 billion for Pharmasset, a small company with an experimental hepatitis C drug. Many thought the price was absurd.
It was a bargain. Sovaldi and Harvoni, launched in 2013 and 2014, cured hepatitis C in most patients, and Gilead's profits briefly rivalled those of the largest drugmakers, along with fierce criticism of a list price of tens of thousands of dollars per course. Then the problem with a cure became obvious: once patients are cured, the market shrinks. Revenue declined, the stock spent years drifting down, and the 2017 purchase of CAR-T pioneer Kite was slow to pay off. Remdesivir gave a Covid bump, and newer HIV drugs, including a twice-yearly injectable for prevention approved in 2025, revived growth.
The lesson: Peak earnings from a one-off product cycle deserve a low multiple, because even the best drug can cure its own market and erode its revenue.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | $1.10 | $100,000 | $14,783 | 100.0× |
| 2000 | $8.00 | $13,750 | $4,626 | 13.8× |
| 2003 | $4.20 | $26,190 | $7,727 | 26.2× |
| 2005 | $17.00 | $6,471 | $5,763 | 6.5× |
| 2007 | $33.00 | $3,333 | $4,789 | 3.3× |
| 2008 | $46.00 | $2,391 | $4,626 | 2.4× |
| 2010 | $43.00 | $2,558 | $6,071 | 2.6× |
| 2012 | $41.00 | $2,683 | $5,312 | 2.7× |
| 2015 | $94.00 | $1,170 | $3,301 | 1.2× |
| 2018 | $72.00 | $1,528 | $2,519 | 1.5× |
| 2020 | $65.00 | $1,692 | $2,092 | 1.7× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1995, turning $1,000 into $100,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $14,783.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Gilead is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
Play Sixty-40More in US Health
- What if you bought Pfizer?
- What if you bought Johnson & Johnson?
- What if you bought Merck?
- What if you bought Eli Lilly?
- What if you bought Amgen?
- What if you bought Regeneron?