Eli Lilly shares looked like they’d been through an intensive Zepbound weight-loss treatment Thursday, losing 14% of their value on the New York Stock Exchange. Shareholders prefer their stocks to bulk up.

The culprit was data for Lilly’s weight loss pill, meant to expand the reach of its existing GLP-1 treatment for obesity. What it underscored is just how fierce, down to mere percentage points, the next several years of competition in the medical weight loss market will be.

The Percentage Gap

Lilly’s second-quarter results reported Thursday were more than fine: $15.5 billion in revenue beat Wall Street estimates. And the company continued a streak of winning market share from its chief rival in the business of GLP-1s, which have been hailed as miracle drugs for their usefulness in treating diabetes and obesity.

On Wednesday, Denmark’s Novo Nordisk said GLP-1 diabetes drugs’ sales growth slowed to just 8% in the second quarter, far behind the 21% posted last year. Sales of obesity drugs, including Wegovy, rose 56%, the same pace as last year. A day later, Lilly revealed that it continued to encroach on its rivals’ market share in the second quarter, with Mounjaru revenue up 68% year-over-year to $5.2 billion and Zepbound revenue up 172% to $3.4 billion. The company raised its full-year guidance by $1.5 billion to between $60 billion and $62 billion.

But then came the data everyone was anticipating. GLP-1s have become so popular that one in eight US adults, or 12%, told a poll by KFF Health last year that they had taken a GLP-1 drug before, while 6% said they were then using one. But the treatments are currently administered through a weekly injection, which companies say drives away patients averse to needles. To remedy that, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk have been developing GPL-1 pills, which could unlock billions in new sales. Morgan Stanley analysts previously said the bull case for Lilly’s GLP-1 pill treatment for obesity and diabetes is $40 billion in annual sales by 2033. Thursday revealed a slight hitch:

• The pills have a problem: Lilly’s orforglipron helped non-diabetic overweight or obese patients lose 12.4% of their weight in a late-stage study. Sounds great, except it’s less than the 15% weight loss achieved by Novo Nordisk’s oral version of Wegovy, for which that company is already seeking FDA approval.
• The performance gap was substantial enough to convince many investors that Novo’s pill will have the upper hand when the two go to market. After the data was released, one analyst — David Risinger of Leerink Partners — cut his forecast for orforglipron’s 2030 sales by 38% to $13.5 billion.

And the Winner Is: Novo, at least for a day. Losing market share to Lilly and copycat drugmakers has weighed heavily on the company, with its shares falling over 43% this year. The news of the muted performance of its chief rival’s GLP-1 pill sent Novo’s shares up 7.5% on Thursday. Both treatments are still expected to be big earners, but Novo — which has also had to tangle with tariff threats this year, unlike US-based Lilly — can claim another small victory in the race to produce the biggest (weight) loser.

When chip industry veteran Lip-Bu Tan joined Intel as CEO back in March, he was supposed to fix the company’s problems. Now, Tan has become the company’s problem.

That’s thanks to some social media musings from America’s commander-in-chief, who alleged Thursday morning that Tan is “highly CONFLICTED” and demanded he resign “immediately.” So what now for Intel, one of only a handful of US chipmakers that makes its product in America?

Intelligent Design

While the president’s social media post offered no specific reason for Tan to resign, it did come just after Republican Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Intel Chairman Frank Yeary inquiring about Tan’s alleged control of “dozens of Chinese companies” in the chipmaking space including at least eight with ties to the Chinese military, citing a Reuters report from earlier this year. More specifically, POTUS’s call for resignation followed a Fox Business segment on Cotton’s letter to Yeary by mere minutes.

Cotton’s letter also pointed out that from 2009 to 2021, Tan served as CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which just last week agreed to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge and pay the US government $140 million to settle claims it sold chip design hardware and software to a Chinese military university between 2015 and 2021.

While we’d say an out-of-the-blue political firestorm isn’t ideal — after all, it’s not every day that a sitting US president calls for the resignation of a major private corporation — Intel has been an economic piñata for roughly the past decade:

• In fact, earlier this week, Reuters reported that Intel is struggling to perfect its so-called “18A” high-end chip manufacturing process, pitched as a key step to closing the technology gap with industry frontrunner TSMC and a way to score new clients.
• The setback comes just after the company warned in its most recent earnings call in July that it could abandon the advanced chipmaking space altogether if it can’t attract major new customers. Meanwhile, its planned chipmaking plant in Ohio — funded in part by more than $8 billion in federal grants — continues to face delays.

Good POTUS, Bad POTUS: Meena Bose, executive dean for public policy and public service programs at Hofstra University, told The Wall Street Journal that the White House insisting that a CEO resign is “at the very least unusual, if not unprecedented.” (The Obama administration ousted GM’s then-CEO Rick Wagoner during auto industry bailouts in 2009, and the George W. Bush administration forced out then-AIG chief Robert Willumstad during the financial crisis.) The rest of the tech industry, meanwhile, is scrambling to stay on President Trump’s good side after he announced a 100% tariff on semiconductor imports Wednesday, with exemptions given to companies that invest in US manufacturing — a la Apple’s $100 billion commitment.

Another week, another IPO that’s headed to the moon. Though this time, we mean it figuratively and literally.

Just a week after Figma’s successful market debut, Firefly Aerospace — which successfully pulled off America’s first lunar landing since 1972 earlier this year — saw its stock pop more than 34% after listing on the Nasdaq on Thursday.

Escape Velocity

Firefly has been lighting it up all year. In addition to delivering its robotic Blue Ghost lander to the moon in March for a NASA-funded mission to research moondust, completed when three attempts by competitors failed, Firefly has launched its Alpha rocket six times (though its most recent attempt in April suffered a mishap and ultimately failed to deliver a Lockheed Martin satellite into orbit).

Still, investors were giddy at the chance to back the burgeoning space player. Earlier this week, Firefly upped its targeted share price range, from between $35 and $39 to a range of $41 to $43, before shares ultimately opened at $45. The company sold 19 million shares on Thursday, raising $868 million in the process, with shares trading at just over $60 at close, putting the company’s market cap at around $9 billion. For its next missions, it’ll need the cash:

• Firefly’s research and development spending last year ballooned by 27% to nearly $150 million, according to its IPO prospectus, while its net loss grew to $231 million, compared with $136 million the year before.
• Still, it generated revenue of $61 million in 2024, up 10% year-over-year, while its backlog of orders stands at around $1.1 billion as of March.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Chief among those orders are more than 30 launches with its Alpha rocket, as well as a partnership with Northrop Grumman to develop a partially reusable rocket called Eclipse to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon-9 reusable rocket. Given the somewhat turbulent relationship between SpaceX founder Elon Musk and the current administration, eclipsing the industry leader the next time government contracts are doled out may not be a moonshot.