It has been my privilege to serve as Amgen’s chief executive officer since 2012 and as its chairman since 2013. I joined Amgen in 2006 in Operations, a great place to learn the company from the ground up. I became chief financial officer in 2007 and president and chief operating officer in 2010. Prior to Amgen, I spent nearly two decades as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley – many of those years in London – where I worked mostly with health care clients.Amgen is a true American success story. The company was founded in 1980 as Applied Molecular Genetics by three biotechnology entrepreneurs who set up shop in Thousand Oaks, California. More than 40 years later, Amgen is still headquartered in Thousand Oaks – and our original building still stands – but we’ve grown to become one of the largest and most successful biotech companies in the world with 2023 sales of more than $28 billion and some 27,000 employees. In August 2020, Amgen became one of the 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.All of us at Amgen are inspired by the same mission: to serve patients. Our portfolio includes 25 medicines for cancer, heart disease, migraine, osteoporosis, autoimmune disorders, and other serious illnesses that affect hundreds of millions of people and cost society hundreds of billions of dollars. We’ve invested nearly $19 billion in research and development over the last five years, utilizing industry-leading human genetics capabilities to inform our efforts to find new medicines. This is an exciting time at Amgen. We are at an inflection point in our ability to treat – and perhaps even to cure – serious illnesses. I often reflect on a quote from Senator Robert Kennedy: “Some men see things as they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” My goal as CEO of Amgen is to have a company full of smart, passionate people who come to work every day asking, “Why not?”