Trump was supposed to unlock IPO market, but CoreWeave debut reflects ongoing skepticism
CoreWeave Inc. signage during the company’s initial public offering at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, US, on Friday, March 28, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.
The Trump presidency was set to usher in a rush of money to the markets, spurred by a new era of deregulation and lower taxes that would lead high-valued tech companies off the sidelines and onto public exchanges after a four-year lull in initial public offerings.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said in January that he sensed a “more constructive kind of optimism” and that the IPO market is “going to pick up.”
But a little over two months into President Donald Trump’s second White House term, the first test case has been a flop.
After downsizing its IPO late Thursday and pricing below its expected range, CoreWeave was unchanged in its market debut on Friday, closing at $40 and leaving the company with a market cap that’s right around where the company was valued by private investors a year ago.
The debut coincided with a 2.7% drop in the Nasdaq on Friday, a decline that put the tech-heavy index down more than 10% in 2025 and on pace ofr its worst quarterly performance since mid-2022.
Macro concerns are being driven by President Trump’s tariffs on America’s top trading partners and dramatic government cost cuts, moves that are combining to simultaneously raise prices and lift unemployment. The deterioration in consumer sentiment was even worse than anticipated in March as worries over inflation intensified, according to a University of Michigan survey released Friday.
That all created a tough backdrop for CoreWeave to try and crack open the IPO market, particularly given concerns swirling around the company and its valuation. CoreWeave is one of the leading suppliers of Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, for artificial intelligence training and workloads. Demand has been so hot that CoreWeave’s revenue soared more than 700% last year to almost $2 billion.
However, CoreWeave counts on Microsoft for over 60% of sales and recorded a net loss of $863 million last year, due to the hefty costs of GPUs and the expenses associated with leasing and operating data centers. As of Dec. 31, the company had $8 billion in debt.
“It’s a bit disappointing that the price was dropped so significantly at the open,” Joe Medved, a partner at Lerer Hippeau, told CNBC’s “Money Movers” on Friday. “This company has some idiosyncrasies around debt levels and revenue concentration that I think make it a little challenged.”
The other tech-related companies that have filed to go public this year have very different profiles. Hinge Health is a digital health company that uses software to help patients treat pain and injuries, while Klarna is an online lender and StubHub runs a ticket marketplace.
Those are a few of the names that investors are waiting to see hit the market in the near future, hoping for a rebound after tech IPOs almost ground to a halt in late 2021 and have hardly picked up since. According to CB Insights, there are more than 1,200 startups worldwide worth at least $1 billion in the private market. Over 50 of them have been valued at $10 billion or more.
Despite a dearth of IPOs, the highest-profile startups have been able to raise cash from hedge funds, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds, which have all jumped into the late-stage venture capital game. Additionally, megacap tech companies including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Nvidia (one of CoreWeave’s key investors) have poured billions of dollars into private AI companies.
“If you’re the founders or CEOs of these companies, you don’t want to deal with the public markets. There’s plenty of demand from these private buyers,” Medved said. “There’s not as much incentive to go out.”
CoreWeave could be fine. The stock could turn up at any time and the broader market could rebound in the second quarter, lifting investor confidence in IPOs. And CoreWeave has the benefit of roughly $1.5 billion in fresh capital from its share sale, even though that’s well below the $2.7 billion that would’ve been raised at the top end of its range.
But the tepid reception stands in stark contrast to how IPOs looked during the record years of 2020 and 2021, when tech companies would raise the range, price above the top end and still see the stock jump in its debut.
CoreWeave CEO and co-founder Michael Intrator told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the pricing of the company’s IPO reflected “a lot of headwinds in the macro.”
“We believe that as the public markets get to know us, get to know how we execute, get to know how we build our infrastructure, get to know how we build our client relationships and the incredible capacity of our solutions, the company will be very successful,” Intrator said.
WATCH: CoreWeave shares begin trading after opening at $39 per share
The Hims app arranged on a smartphone in New York on Feb. 12, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Hims & Hers Health shares closed up 5% on Tuesday after the company announced patients can access Eli Lilly‘s weight loss medication Zepbound and diabetes drug Mounjaro, as well as the generic injection liraglutide, through its platform.
Zepbound, Mounjaro and liraglutide are part of the class of weight loss medications called GLP-1s, which have exploded in popularity in recent years. Hims & Hers launched a weight loss program in late 2023, but its GLP-1 offerings have evolved as the company has contended with a volatile supply and regulatory environment.
Lilly’s weekly injections Zepbound and Mounjaro will cost patients $1,899 a month, according to the Hims & Hers website. The generic liraglutide will cost $299 a month, but it requires a daily injection and can be less effective than other GLP-1 medications.
“As we look ahead, we plan to continue to expand our weight loss offering to deliver an even more holistic, personalized experience,” Dr. Craig Primack, senior vice president of weight loss at Hims & Hers, wrote in a blog post.
A Lilly spokesperson said in a statement that the company has “no affiliation” with Hims & Hers and noted that Zepbound is available at lower costs for people who are insured for the product or for those who buy directly from the company.
In May, Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s GLP-1 weight loss medications Ozempic and Wegovy. The offering was immensely popular and helped generate more than $225 million in revenue for the company in 2024.
But compounded drugs can traditionally only be mass produced when the branded medications treatments are in shortage. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced in February that the shortage of semaglutide injections products had been resolved.
That meant Hims & Hers had to largely stop offering the compounded medications, though some consumers may still be able to access personalized doses if it’s clinically applicable.
During the company’s quarterly call with investors in February, Hims & Hers said its weight loss offerings will primarily consist of its oral medications and liraglutide. The company said it expects its weight loss offerings to generate at least $725 million in annual revenue, excluding contributions from compounded semaglutide.
But the company is still lobbying for compounded medications. A pop up on Hims & Hers’ website, which was viewed by CNBC, encourages users to “use your voice” and urge Congress and the FDA to preserve access to compounded treatments.
With Tuesday’s rally, Hims and Hers shares are up about 27% in 2025 after soaring 172% last year.
WATCH: Hims & Hers shares tumble over concerns around weight-loss business
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds a smartphone as he makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Meta’s head of artificial intelligence research announced Tuesday that she will be leaving the company.
Joelle Pineau, the company’s vice president of AI research, announced her departure in a LinkedIn post, saying her last day at the social media company will be May 30.
Her departure comes at a challenging time for Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a top priority, investing billions of dollars in an effort to become the market leader ahead of rivals like OpenAI and Google.
Zuckerberg has said that it is his goal for Meta to build an AI assistant with more than 1 billion users and artificial general intelligence, which is a term used to describe computers that can think and take actions comparable to humans.
“As the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work,” Pineau wrote. “I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world, and to responsibly bring them into the lives of billions of people.”
Vice President of AI Research and Head of FAIR at Meta Joelle Pineau attends a technology demonstration at the META research laboratory in Paris on February 7, 2025.
Stephane De Sakutin | AFP | Getty Images
Pineau was one of Meta’s top AI researchers and led the company’s fundamental AI research unit, or FAIR, since 2023. There, she oversaw the company’s cutting-edge computer science-related studies, some of which are eventually incorporated into the company’s core apps.
She joined the company in 2017 to lead Meta’s Montreal AI research lab. Pineau is also a computer science professor at McGill University, where she is a co-director of its reasoning and learning lab.
Some of the projects Pineau helped oversee include Meta’s open-source Llama family of AI models and other technologies like the PyTorch software for AI developers.
Pineau’s departure announcement comes a few weeks ahead of Meta’s LlamaCon AI conference on April 29. There, the company is expected to detail its latest version of Llama. Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, to whom Pineau reported to, said in March that Llama 4 will help power AI agents, the latest craze in generative AI. The company is also expected to announce a standalone app for its Meta AI chatbot, CNBC reported in February.
“We thank Joelle for her leadership of FAIR,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “She’s been an important voice for Open Source and helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them.”
Pineau did not reveal her next role but said she “will be taking some time to observe and to reflect, before jumping into a new adventure.”
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