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Patent protection for Wegovy — Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster weight loss drug, which contains the second generation GLP-1 active ingredient and is at least twice as effective — is expected to expire by the decade’s end.

Michael Siluk | UCG | Getty Images

For Gray Beard, a kindergarten teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, losing weight had become a grueling task. She’d tried five different programs in her life and never found lasting results.

Her luck started to change last year, when she saw a promotion on Instagram for the Ro Body Program, a new offering from online health startup Ro. The ad said eligible patients could get prescribed GLP-1s, the buzzy class of obesity treatments that’s turned into a booming business in recent years.

Beard, 47, had previously sought a GLP-1 prescription, but her doctor “wouldn’t even try” to get it approved, assuming her insurance company would reject coverage of the costly medication, she said. GLP-1s cost roughly $1,000 per month before insurance and other rebates. 

Customers of Ro’s Body Program could get prescribed a GLP-1, such as Novo Nordisk ‘s weight loss drug Wegovy or diabetes treatment Ozempic, and meet monthly with a doctor. They also get access to an educational curriculum, 24/7 messaging, one-on-one coaching with nurses and assistance with navigating insurance complexities. 

Beard was 210 pounds when she first started the program early last year. She’s since lost 40 pounds and serves as an ambassador for Ro. She pays $30 per month for the GLP-1 treatment, after insurance coverage, along with a $145 monthly fee for the program. And she has no plans to leave.

“I’m fine if I have to stay on it forever,” Beard told CNBC.

Ro, founded as Roman in 2017, is part of a growing crop of digital health companies aiming to capitalize on the soaring demand for GLP-1s by building programs and services for users on top of the medications. The opportunity could be massive. Goldman Sachs analysts expect 15 million U.S. adults to be on anti-obesity drugs by 2030, and predict the industry could reach $100 billion in annual revenue by that time.

In addition to Wegovy and Ozempic, the GLP-1 class includes Eli Lilly’s highly popular weight loss drug Zepbound and diabetes treatment Mounjaro. GLP-1s mimic a hormone produced in the gut to suppress a person’s appetite and regulate blood sugar.

Like Ro, other non-drugmakers, including Calibrate, Sesame, Omada Health, Noom, Hims & Hers and even telehealth industry veterans Teladoc Health and WeightWatchers, have rolled out offerings geared toward patients on GLP-1s, or have expanded their services to include the popular medications.

Meanwhile, investors are cheering them on.

Shares of Ro competitor Hims & Hers popped 28% on May 20 after the company said it’s now offering compounded GLP-1 injections in addition to its oral medication kits. CEO Andrew Dudum told CNBC the company is confident customers will be able to access a consistent supply of the injections. 

Dr. Craig Primack talks Hims & Hers launching its own GLP-1 offering as demand rises

Supply shortages are one of the big hurdles for companies in the market, as spiking demand has made it difficult for many patients to access the treatments. There’s also been a rise of counterfeit products, according to the World Health Organization, which said in January that the combination of shortages and the “increased circulation of falsified versions” is particularly problematic for patients with Type 2 diabetes who count on the medication for disease management.

That’s not slowing down industry executives like Ro founder Zachariah Reitano.

Ro didn’t start out as a company focused on weight loss. Reitano launched it to sell treatments online for erectile dysfunction before moving on to hair loss and other pathologies.

In 2020, Ro switched to obesity management and, after Wegovy was approved by the Food and Drug Adminstration the following year, Reitano said patient inquiries started pouring in by the “tens of thousands.”

Now, Ro is shoveling marketing dollars into its GLP-1 program — from digital ads, TV commercials and posters lining subway stations, to influencer campaigns featuring patients such as Beard. 

Reitano told CNBC that GLP-1s are like a “jetpack for positive behavior change.” Patients tend to exercise more, eat healthier and see around a 30% reduction in calorie intake, he said.

“Once you get a little bit of momentum, once you lose a little bit of weight, you’re sleeping better, you have more energy, you can go to the gym, you can eat better and then that’s that positive flywheel,” Reitano said.

Ro has raised around $1 billion in funding to date, according to PitchBook. The company was valued at about $7 billion as of early 2022, though that was before a steep drop in tech stocks and collapse in the initial public offering market forced many startups to dramatically lower their valuations.

WeightWatchers joins the market

WeightWatchers has been in business for over 60 years and is the name in the U.S. perhaps most synonymous with weight loss programs.

In December, the company entered the GLP-1 market, with a behavioral-support program that’s available through its general membership subscription, starting at $23 per month. Members can participate whether they get a GLP-1 prescription through their primary care physician or through the new WeightWatchers Clinic, introduced alongside the behavioral program.

Because GLP-1s suppress appetites, WeightWatchers quickly learned that it needed an entirely new program for people taking the meds, said Gary Foster, the company’s chief scientific officer.

“They don’t need help with what to do for dessert or how to deal with the bread on the table at a restaurant,” Foster said in an interview. “That’s like 50-60% of what we would do for people without meds.” 

Clinic members who participate in the GLP-1 program have to pay an additional fee — starting at $99 a month — for exclusive access to registered dieticians, fitness professionals and care team coordinators. 

WeightWatchers said in its first-quarter results earlier this month that 87,000 people had subscribed to the clinic, although not all of them are taking GLP-1s. The company expects to have between 140,000 and 160,000 clinic subscribers by year-end, the report said. 

It hasn’t been enough to change WeightWatchers’ trajectory. The stock has plummeted 83% this year on concerns about the company’s debt load, its core weight loss business and Oprah Winfrey’s announced departure from the board in February.

With respect to GLP-1s and their impact on weight loss, “the landscape is quite exciting,” Foster said. “I think we should all celebrate and really be delighted by the fact that there are more tools in the toolbox to help people trying to manage their weight.” 

Kim Gradwell with an Ozempic injection needle at her home in Dudley, North Tyneside, Britain, October 31, 2023. 

Lee Smith | Reuters

Jennifer VanGilder, a 51-year-old economics professor at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, said she’d tried countless methods to lose weight, from strict diets to services like the defunct Jenny Craig. She was considering bariatric surgery before she came across a program from digital health startup Calibrate.   

Calibrate, founded in 2019, was one of the first companies to treat obesity by combining GLP-1s with one-on-one coaching. The program costs $199 a month, which doesn’t include the medication, and requires an initial three-month-long commitment.

VanGilder signed up nearly four years ago and started taking the weekly diabetes injection Ozempic specifically for weight loss. She later switched to Wegovy. 

VanGilder said GLP-1s aren’t a miracle drug, but by taking them and putting in the work, she said she lost around 100 pounds of her 242-pound weight. The big difference between Calibrate and prior weight loss efforts, VanGilder said, is that she doesn’t feel like she’s dieting.

“That’s why I’ve been able to stay on it for as long as I have,” VanGilder said.

Calibrate is one of the only companies to regularly release reports detailing the results of its weight loss program. The company’s 2024 report examined data from roughly 16,000 members who completed at least one year of the program as of October, along with a smaller group of patients who continued for longer. 

Average weight loss among patients was 16.2% at 12 months in the program, 17.3% at 18 months and 17.9% at 24 months, according to the report. 

“Our data of proven outcomes shows that we can deliver faster, better results than some of the leading GLP-1 clinical trials,” said Dr. Kristin Baier, Calibrate’s vice president of clinical development, in an interview.

But Calibrate has hit some major speed bumps in the past couple years.

After raising $100 million in venture funding during the peak of the tech market in 2021, the combination of supply shortages, insurance challenges and the broader market swoon forced the startup to lay off hundreds of employees between 2022 and 2023. The company was acquired in October at a discount by private equity firm Madryn Asset Management.

Calibrate CEO Rob MacNaughton said the sector was “ill equipped” to manage the “dramatic demand that led to, at some point, severely, severely constrained supply” of GLP-1s last year. 

Under new ownership, the company continues to promote its GLP-1 service, which its said is important because the drugs themselves aren’t sufficient.

“GLP-1 medications, while they are safe and effective, they are a tool,” said Baier. “They are not the entire treatment.”

Options for patients

Ro’s Reitano said shortages of Wegovy and other GLP-1s last year prompted his company to temporarily pause advertising. Ro also dolled out refunds and credits to patients in its program who weren’t able to pick up their medication within 30 days of receiving a prescription, he said. 

Reitano said Ro has built up “both technical tools and operations” to help patients navigate supply issues. That includes transferring prescriptions to different pharmacies based on their GLP-1 supply and proximity to a patient. From July to August, the company made 50,000 phone calls to pharmacies across the U.S. to coordinate those transfers, Reitano said. 

Ro has also expanded its medication offerings, adding Zepbound following its U.S. approval in November. 

“We added that to our formulary, and that’s really when we started advertising again because we had confidence that we’d be able to get patients an option,” Reitano said. 

Ro CEO on telehealth and the impact of weight loss drugs

Insurance problems persist, though.

Some employers have dropped weight loss drugs from their plans due to the costs associated with covering the treatments for thousands of patients. The federal Medicare program by law can’t cover weight loss drugs unless the prescription is for another approved health benefit, such as diabetes or cardiovascular health. 

Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk offer commercial savings card programs that aim to expand access to their GLP-1s. Eli Lilly allows people with insurance coverage for Zepbound to pay as low as $25 for a monthly prescription. And users who can’t get insurance coverage, may be able to get the drug for as low as $550 a month.

The high costs and difficult access led Hims & Hers to initially stay out of the GLP-1 market even after launching its new weight loss program in December

Dr. Craig Primack, senior vice president of weight management at Hims, said the company decided to offer treatment regimens based on drugs that had been studied and prescribed for decades.  

“We’re going to have people, for one reason or another, who either don’t want an injection at this point, or are just looking for a different alternative,” Primack told CNBC in an interview in March. “These are tools we’ve been using in our field for a long, long time.”

Last week, Hims said customers can now access compounded GLP-1 medications via a prescription from a licensed health-care provider on the platform. Hims said it plans to make branded GLP-1 medications available to its customers once supply is consistently available. The company’s oral medication kits start at $79 a month, and its compounded GLP-1 injections will start at $199 a month.

Dudum said the company has partnered with one of the largest generic manufacturers in the U.S. and has a certain degree of exclusivity with the facility. The manufacturer has FDA oversight, he said. 

Even before Hims introduced compounded GLP-1 injections to its weight loss offering, the company said it expects the program will generate more than $100 million in revenue by the end of 2025.

Beard, the Ro customer, has had to make some changes since starting the Body Program. She initially took Wegovy with no out-of-pocket costs, thanks to her insurance coverage and a savings card program from Novo Nordisk. But she hit a plateau on the drug, so she switched to Zepbound. 

While there have been some hiccups along the way, Beard says the program has largely been a “seamless” addition to her day-to-day life, and that she no longer thinks about food all the time. She even got a family member to enroll.

“We’re not having any bad side effects, so why go off of it?” she said, adding “it’s helped both of us get to the weight we want.”

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AppLovin can offer TikTok ‘much stronger bid than others,’ CEO says

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AppLovin can offer TikTok 'much stronger bid than others,' CEO says

Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.

Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.

“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.

The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid. 

“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.

AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.

Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.

WATCH: AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

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Trump’s tariff rates for other countries radically larger than World Trade data

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Trump's tariff rates for other countries radically larger than World Trade data

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event announcing new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2025.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy this week, leaving many economists and U.S. trade partners to question how the White House calculated its rates.

Trump’s plan established a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country, though many nations such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to much steeper rates. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump held up a poster board that outlined the tariffs that it claims are “charged” to the U.S., as well as the “discounted” reciprocal tariffs that America would implement in response.

Those reciprocal tariffs are mostly about half of what the Trump administration said each country has charged the U.S. The poster suggests China charges a tariff of 67%, for instance, and that the U.S. will implement a 34% reciprocal tariff in response.

However, a report from the Cato Institute suggests the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much different than the figures touted by the Trump administration. The report is based on trade-weighted average duty rates from the World Trade Organization in 2023, the most recent year available.

The Cato Institute says the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate from China was 3%. Similarly, the administration says the EU charges the U.S. a tariff of 39%, while the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 2.7%, according to the report.

In India, the Trump administration claims that a 52% tariff is charged against the U.S., but Cato found that the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 12%.

Many users on social media this week were quick to notice that the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. It’s an unusual approach, as it suggests that the U.S. factored in the trade deficit in goods but ignored trade in services.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative briefly explained its approach in a release, and stated that computing the combined effects of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in various countries “can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”

If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said in the release.

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As Microsoft turns 50, Nadella sees future success built on ability to ‘win the new’

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As Microsoft turns 50, Nadella sees future success built on ability to 'win the new'

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during the Microsoft Build conference at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on May 21, 2024.

Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images

A half-century ago, childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft from a strip mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Five decades and almost $3 trillion later, the company celebrates its 50th birthday on Friday from its sprawling campus in Redmond, Washington.

Now the second most valuable publicly traded company in the world, Microsoft has only had three CEOs in its history, and all of them are in attendance for the monumental event. One is current CEO Satya Nadella. The other two are Gates and Steve Ballmer, both among the 11 richest people in the world due to their Microsoft fortunes.

While Microsoft has mostly been on the ascent of late, with Nadella turning the company into a major power player in cloud computing and artificial intelligence, the birthday party lands at an awkward moment.

The company’s stock price has dropped for four consecutive months for the first time since 2009 and just suffered its steepest quarterly drop in three years. That was all before President Donald Trump’s announcement this week of sweeping tariffs, which sent the Nasdaq tumbling on Thursday and Microsoft down another 2.4%.

Cloud computing has been Microsoft’s main source of new revenue since Nadella took over from Ballmer as CEO in 2014. But the Azure cloud reported disappointing revenue in the latest quarter, a miss that finance chief Amy Hood attributed in January to power and space shortages and a sales posture that focused too much on AI. Hood said revenue growth in the current quarter will fall to 10% from 17% a year earlier

Nadella said management is refining sales incentives to maximize revenue from traditional workloads, while positioning the company to benefit from the ongoing AI boom.

“You would rather win the new than just protect the past,” Nadella told analysts on a conference call.

The past remains healthy. Microsoft still generates around one-fifth of its roughly $262 billion in annual revenue from productivity software, mostly from commercial clients. Windows makes up around 10% of sales.

Meanwhile, the company has used its massive cash pile to orchestrate its three largest acquisitions on record in a little over eight years, snapping up LinkedIn in late 2016, Nuance Communications in 2022 and Activision Blizzard in 2023, for a combined $121 billion.

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“Microsoft has figured out how to stay ahead of the curve, and 50 years later, this is a company that can still be on the forefront of technology innovation,” said Soma Somasegar, a former Microsoft executive who now invests in startups at venture firm Madrona. “That’s a commendable place for the company to be in.”

When Somasegar gave up his corporate vice president position at Microsoft in 2015, the company was fresh off a $7.6 billion write-down from Ballmer’s ill-timed purchase of Nokia’s devices and services business.

Microsoft is now in a historic phase of investment. The company has built a $13.8 billion stake in OpenAI and last year spent almost $76 billion on capital expenditures and finance leases, up 83% from a year prior, partly to enable the use of AI models in the Azure cloud. In January, Nadella said Microsoft has $13 billion in annualized AI revenue, more even than OpenAI, which just closed a financing round valuing the company at $300 billion.

Microsoft’s spending spree has constrained free cash flow growth. Guggenheim analysts wrote in a note after the company’s earnings report in January, “You just have to believe in the future.” 

Of the 35 Microsoft analysts tracked by FactSet, 32 recommend buying the stock, which has appreciated tenfold since Nadella became CEO. Azure has become a fearsome threat to Amazon Web Services, which pioneered the cloud market in the 2000s, and startups as well as enterprises are flocking to its cloud technology.

Winston Weinberg, CEO of legal AI startup Harvey, uses OpenAI models through Azure. Weinberg lauded Nadella’s focus on customers of all sizes.

“Satya has literally responded to emails within 15 minutes of us having a technical problem, and he’ll route it to the right person,” Weinberg said.

Still, technology is moving at an increasingly rapid pace and Microsoft’s ability to stay on top is far from guaranteed. Industry experts highlighted four key issues the company has to address as it pushes into its next half-century.

Microsoft didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Regulation

There’s some optimism that the Trump administration and a new head of the Federal Trade Commission will open up the door to the kinds of deal-making that proved very challenging during Joe Biden’s presidency, when Lina Khan headed the FTC.

But regulatory uncertainty remains.

It’s not a new risk for Microsoft. In 1995, the company paid a $46 million breakup fee to tax software maker Intuit after the Justice Department filed suit to block the proposed deal. Years later, the DOJ got Microsoft to revamp some of its practices after a landmark antitrust case.

Microsoft pushed through its largest acquisition ever, the $75 billion purchase of video game publisher Activision, during Biden’s term. But only after a protracted legal battle with the FTC.

At the very end of Biden’s time in office, the FTC opened an antitrust investigation on Microsoft. That probe is ongoing, Bloomberg reported in March.

Nadella has cultivated a relationship with Trump. In January, the two reportedly met for lunch at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, alongside Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

President Donald Trump shakes hands with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during an American Technology Council roundtable at the White House in Washington on June 19, 2017.

Nicholas Kamm | AFP | Getty Images

The U.S. isn’t the only concern. The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority said in January that an independent inquiry found that “Microsoft is using its strong position in software to make it harder for AWS and Google to compete effectively for cloud customers that wish to use Microsoft software on the cloud.”

Microsoft last year committed to unbundling Teams from Microsoft 365 productivity software subscriptions globally to address concerns from the European Union’s executive arm, the European Commission.

Noncore markets

Fairly early in Microsoft’s history the company became the world’s largest software maker. And in cloud, Microsoft is the biggest challenger to AWS. Most of the company’s revenue comes from corporations, schools and governments.

But Microsoft is in other markets where its position is weaker. Those include video games, laptops and search advertising.

Mary Jo Foley, editor in chief at advisory group Directions on Microsoft, said the company may be better off focusing on what it does best, rather than continuing to offer Xbox consoles and Surface tablets.

“Microsoft is not good at anything in the consumer space (with the possible exception of gaming),” wrote Foley, who has covered the company on and off since 1984. “You’re wasting time and money on trying to figure it out. Microsoft is an enterprise company — and that is more than OK.”

It’s unlikely Microsoft will back away from games, particularly after the Activision deal. Nearly $12 billion of Microsoft’s $69.6 billion in fourth-quarter revenue came from gaming, search and news advertising, and consumer subscriptions to the Microsoft 365 productivity bundle. That doesn’t include sales of devices, Windows licenses or advertising on LinkedIn.

“As a company, Microsoft’s all-in on gaming,” Nadella said in 2021 in an appearance alongside gaming unit head Phil Spencer. “We believe we can play a leading role in democratizing gaming and defining that future of interactive entertainment, quite frankly, at scale.”

AI pressure

Microsoft has an unquestionably strong position in AI today, thanks in no small part to its early alliance with OpenAI. Microsoft has added the startup’s AI models to Windows, Excel, Bing and other products.

The breakout has been GitHub Copilot, which generates source code and answers developers’ questions. GitHub reached $2 billion in annualized revenue last year, with Copilot accounting for more than 40% of sales growth for the business. Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, right, speaks as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman looks on during the OpenAI DevDay event in San Francisco on Nov. 6, 2023.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

But speedy deployment in AI can be worrisome.

The company is “not providing the underpinnings needed to deploy AI properly, in terms of security and governance — all because they care more about being ‘first,'” Foley wrote. Microsoft also hasn’t been great at helping customers understand the return on investment, she wrote.

AI-ready Copilot+ PCs, which Microsoft introduced last year, aren’t gaining much traction. The company had to delay the release of the Recall search feature to prevent data breaches. And the Copilot assistant subscription, at $30 a month for customers of the Microsoft 365 productivity suite, hasn’t become pervasive in the business world.

“Copilot was really their chance to take the lead,” said Jason Wong, an analyst at technology industry researcher Gartner. “But increasingly, what it’s seeming like is Copilot is just an add-on and not like a net-new thing to drive AI.”

Innovation

At 50, the biggest question facing Microsoft is whether it can still build impressive technology on its own. Products like the Surface and HoloLens augmented reality headset generated buzz, but they hit the market years ago.

Teams was a novel addition to its software bundle, though the app’s success came during the Covid pandemic after the explosive growth in products like Zoom and Slack, which Salesforce acquired. And Microsoft is still researching quantum computing.

In AI, Microsoft’s best bet so far was its investment in OpenAI. Somasegar said Microsoft is in prime position to be a big player in the market.

“To me, it’s been 2½ years since ChatGPT showed up, and we are not even at the Uber and Airbnb moment,” Somasegar said. “There is a tremendous amount of value creation that needs to happen in AI. Microsoft as much as everybody else is thinking, ‘What does that mean? How do we get there?'”

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