In 2025, AbbVie cut its research and development budget by 29% — the steepest R&D cut of any major pharmaceutical company that year. In the same year, AbbVie's CEO received a 75% pay raise, bringing his total compensation to $32.5 million. Same company. Same year. Same pool of capital.

That's where Episode 9 starts. And it only gets more specific from there.

Rob Burgess follows the money through the full 2025 financial picture for the 16 largest pharmaceutical companies — the advertising budgets, the executive compensation structures, the shareholder returns, the R&D cuts, and the 22,000 jobs eliminated — and then audits the decade of leadership at PhRMA, the industry's most powerful lobbying organization, that produced these numbers. Every argument the industry makes in defense of its behavior gets examined against the data. None of them hold.

In this episode:

• AbbVie: 75% CEO pay raise, 29% R&D cut, workers laid off — all in the same year
• The 16 largest pharma companies combined cut $5.9 billion from research in 2025 while returning $97 billion to shareholders
• $9 billion in direct-to-consumer advertising in 2025 — up from $6 billion in 2020 — and how the 1997 FDA rule change made it all possible
• Why Trump's September 2025 executive order on misleading drug ads and the FDA's enforcement crackdown are the right moves — and why the rulemaking needs to be codified into law
• How equity-based CEO compensation is structurally designed to reward price increases over research investment
• A decade-long audit of PhRMA's leadership: $305 million in lobbying, drug spending up 60%, advertising tripled, the revolving door kept spinning
• The four industry arguments for high prices, examined one by one against 2025 data
• Three reforms that would change the system's incentives without telling a single company to stop innovating

The bottom line: The innovation argument is not a fact. It's a cover story. The financial filings say so. A decade of data says so. AbbVie says so with every allocation decision it made in 2025.

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