Matt Levine, Columnist

Ozempic Is Bad for Business

Also FTX’s liquidation engine, Elon Musk’s 13G timing and $10 worth of Twitter ads.

October 9, 2023 at 3:59 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Back in 2020 and 2021, as pharmaceutical companies were racing to develop and distribute a Covid-19 vaccine, I wrote a few times about the vaccine and index funds. The idea was:

You could object to various bits of this, and I am not sure it was a practical guide to the behavior of pharmaceutical companies or big asset managers or even Covid lockdowns. But in broad strokes, the pharma companies were creating drug that would vastly increase consumption in general, a universal stimulant for economic demand. You got a shot, and then you went out and took plane trips and cruises and ate at restaurants and went to a WeWork. All sorts of businesses should want to encourage a drug that increases general consumption.