Novo Nordisk Unholsters the Lawyers After Hims Launches a $49 “Wish-Grade Wegovy” Scheme

Everyone in Big Pharma: “Weight-loss drugs are basically free money now.”

Hims & Hers: “Cool, what if we sold Wegovy… but Wish-priced?”

Novo Nordisk: “Absolutely not. Lawyer up.”

And just like that, Hims & Hers stock has caught yet another Home-Alone-style brick to the face. Shares tripped about 8% after Novo Nordisk publicly called Hims’ newly announced Wegovy-style pill illegal and hinted it was about to unleash the full fury of its YUGE legal retainer.

If you’re wondering what set this off… the company that won’t stop retargeting me with hair-loss ads (after one paranoid “is my hairline receding?” Google search) announced it would launch a pill containing the same active ingredient as Wegovy (semaglutide) for $49 in the first month, then $99 after. That’s a steal of a deal when you compare it to Novo’s own direct-to-consumer price of $149 for the starter dose.

After the headline dropped revealing the “holy undercut” strategy, Hims ripped +15% and everything was hunky dory… right up until reality showed up with a cease-and-desist letter. By the close, shares were down ~4%, and piling on today’s losses shoved the stock straight to a 12-month low.

Classic fakeout. Cigars lit -> legal threat -> immediate regret.

Oh and believe me, Novo is PISSED. Yes they're defending their proprietary and price gouging pill… but they’re also protecting the engine that makes their money printing machine work.

(Source: Reuters)

GLP-1 drugs are single-handedly putting Big Pharma earnings on their backs, and Novo has made it very clear it’s not interested in letting telehealth startups run a semaglutide flea market out of subscription landing pages. From Novo’s point of view, this isn’t “competition.” It’s IP trespassing with a Stripe checkout.

The biggest problem for Him’s is that its stock lives and dies by weight-loss drugs. Hair loss? Fine. ED meds? Steady. Mental health subscriptions? Sure.

But the multiple (the dream, the hype, the “this could be huge” narrative) comes almost entirely from its perceived ability to sell GLP-1 weight-loss treatments at scale.

(Source: Hims)

That’s why when Novo even threatened to show up with Louis Litt on their doorstep and a freshly printed lawsuit, Hims shareholders immediately bailed ship.

But hey, that’s the risk with a story-driven stock like this… up double digits on hype, down just as fast on reality. Hims aimed at Big Pharma’s most prized possession and got a very predictable response. Let’s just hope they have a better lawyer than Amber Heard did during the Johnny Depp trial, they’re gonna need it.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Google as mentioned in the article.