Jim Cramer says he's standing by Eli Lilly after rival's GLP-1 lawsuit. Here's why

Breaking news from the markets: Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer holds a "Morning Meeting" livestream at 10:20 a. Here's a recap of Tuesday's key moments. The major Wall Street averages rose Tuesday, supported by chipmakers like Micron , Marvell Technology, Astera Labs , and Club name Intel .

Intel soared nearly 7% after its third-party chip manufacturing business landed its first named customer, cybersecurity provider Fortinet , under CEO Lip-Bu Tan. Encouraging as that is, Jim Cramer is just as pleased with the rallies in companies like 3M and General Motors following exceptional quarter reports. "We are seeing the kinds of moves that remind me that there are other opportunities besides tech to make money that are not connected to SK Hynix," Jim said, referring to the South Korean memory-chip maker.

Economic Details

Salesforce was downgraded to a hold-equivalent rating from buy at Morgan Stanley, which also slashed its price target to $185 from $287. It comes less than two weeks after KeyBanc also downgraded Salesforce. While Morgan Stanley credited Salesforce for "actively disrupting itself" to position for the agentic AI era, analysts said Agentforce hasn't ramped fast enough to drive an inflection in organic growth.

Jim said he has "a sliver of hope that actually will inflect or that it's done going down. " On the other hand, Morgan Stanley is still bullish on our other enterprise software holding, Microsoft. While cutting their price target to $600 from $650, analysts kept a buy-equivalent rating.

In justifying its optimism, Morgan Stanley cited expectations for Azure cloud growth to pickup, thanks to added compute capacity, and a belief that improved Copilot monetization is underway. For Jim, he said one of his biggest questions around Microsoft right now is its "contentious" relationship with longtime partner OpenAI as the ChatGPT creator plans for an initial public offering. He also noted that its struggling Xbox division is facing a variety of headwinds, including surging memory costs for gaming consoles.

Analyst Views

Eli Lilly gained more than 1% despite news that it's being sued by rival Novo Nordisk. Novo shares are lower on the day. The Danish competitor alleged that Lilly's ad campaigns for its GLP-1 drugs are misleading consumers about superior efficacy in comparison to Novo's Wegovy injectable.

Novo said Lilly's claims of superiority are "outdated" because they fail to reflect new evidence about a higher, more efficacious dose of Wegovy approved in March. Lilly's ads are based on a head-to-head study comparing its Zepbound versus Wegovy that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in May 2025 , before the higher dose of Wegovy was on the market. In a statement to our CNBC colleagues Tuesday, Lilly said it stands behind its advertising.

"I kind of see this as a nothing burger," said Jeff Marks, director of portfolio analysis for the Club.

Financial markets are tracking the development closely as investors assess the likely impact.