Davos Man

by Peter S. Goodman

In 2014, its first year on the market, Sovaldi racked up sales of $10.3 billion. But its price was so high that state governments—which covered much of the bill for Medicaid patients—were prescribing it only for the most serious cases16. Roughly seven hundred thousand Medicaid patients suffered from hepatitis C, but less than 3 percent17 were able to obtain the drug. The next year, Gilead sold nearly $14 billion’s worth of another hepatitis C drug, Harvoni, which had a price tag of $94,500, for a twelve-week course. These two blockbusters largely explained how Gilead was able to direct more than $26 billion into buying back its own shares between 2014 and 2016,