BUSINESS

Cristina Sanz, who appeared in “Born This Way,” A&E’s reality series about adults with Down syndrome, has died.

Inflation is still biting. The Iran war fallout is still rippling through energy markets. The Fed is talking about rate hikes again. And the June jobs report came in at just 57,000, less than half of what economists expected. If any of that has you uneasy about your portfolio, Warren Buffett has something to say about it.He has been saying it for decades — seven words that most investors know but very few can actually bring themselves to follow when markets get genuinely scary.Warren Buffett’s 7 words every stock market investor needs to hearIn a now-famous New York Times op-ed, Buffett put it plainly with these seven words: “Bad news is an investor’s best friend.” A falling stock price “lets you buy a slice of America’s future at a marked-down price,” he added.While most people read a bad headline and think about getting out, Buffett reads one and starts thinking about what just got cheaper.More Warren Buffett:Warren Buffett’s quietest bet already doubled. Now what?Buffett’s $400 billion war chest stays on the sidelinesWarren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway takes major new bet on GoogleThe logic is not complicated. When fear drives investors to sell, prices fall, often well below what the businesses behind those stocks are actually worth. That gap between price and value is where Buffett has made most of his money.Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares returned 19.7% annually over six decades of his leadership, according to Motley Fool, against 10.5% for the S&P 500 over the same period. The difference did not come from being smarter about predicting markets. It came from being willing to buy when others were selling.Why Buffett says bad news creates stock market opportunityWhen markets sell off on fear, investors rarely stop to ask whether the fear is about short-term noise or a genuine change in business value. They just sell. Strong companies with decades of consistent earnings get dumped alongside weaker ones because investors want out of everything.That is the opening Buffett has always sought. A business does not lose its fundamental value because a headline scared investors. If the company’s earnings power, competitive position, and long-term prospects are still intact, the lower price just means you are getting the same asset for less. Buffett has called that a gift from the market, not a warning.He does not try to call the bottom. He focuses on what a business is worth and whether the current price makes sense relative to that. When fear pushes prices well below what he thinks the business is worth, he buys. Buffett said it himself in a CNBC interview at Berkshire’s May 2026 annual meeting.”We’ve never had people in a more gambling mood than now,” he explained, which is why he is currently sitting on cash rather than buying. The fear has not arrived yet, but when it does, he will be ready.What Buffett actually buys when bad news creates an openingThe seven words are not instructions to buy every stock that drops. Buffett has been specific about this his entire career. When bad news pushes prices lower, he goes looking for businesses with durable competitive advantages, consistent earnings, and balance sheets strong enough to survive whatever caused the fear.Valuation is just as important as quality. Even a great company is a bad investment at the wrong price. Earlier in 2026, when the S&P 500 fell around 9%, Buffett said he was nowhere near buying that dip, The Motley Fool noted. A 9% decline on an expensive market does not automatically create a value opportunity. The question is always whether the price now reflects what the business is genuinely worth over the long run.That is what separates his approach from buying every dip. In 2022, many investors bought heavily discounted tech stocks that kept falling because the companies had no earnings and no path to profitability. Bad news had created a lower price. Still, a lower price does not create value where none existed.

One thing Buffett has suggested doing before markets get rough is building a stock watchlist.Johannes/Getty Images

How to apply Buffett’s bad news philosophy to your own portfolioThe hardest part of following this advice is not intellectual. It is emotional. When your account balance is falling and every news alert is alarming, buying feels wrong. That is exactly when Buffett says it is right. Most investors know this in theory and cannot do it in practice.One thing Buffett has suggested doing before markets get rough is building a watchlist. Write down the companies you would want to own if only they were cheaper. Know what you think they are worth. When fear drives prices down toward or below that level, you are ready to act instead of react.For investors who would rather not analyze individual companies, Buffett has long pointed to low-cost S&P 500 index funds as the most practical way to put the same philosophy to work. A JPMorgan study found that staying fully invested in the S&P 500 over the past 20 years produced annualized returns of around 9.4%. Missing the 10 best days in that 20-year stretch cut that return nearly in half. Most of those best days happened during periods of maximum fear, Fortune confirmed. This was also when most investors were heading for the exits.What Warren Buffett’s bad news rule means for investors right nowBerkshire Hathaway is currently sitting on $397 billion in cash, according to The Motley Fool. Buffett stepped down as CEO on Dec. 31, 2025, handing the reins to Greg Abel, but he remains board president and still works with Abel on investments. The cash pile has grown, not shrunk, since the handover. Buffett and Abel have been watching markets and waiting, not buying.The Shiller CAPE ratio, which measures stock prices against inflation-adjusted earnings over the prior 10 years, sits around 41 against a historical average of 17. By that measure, stocks are expensive. Buffett is practicing the other half of his famous line right now: Be fearful when others are greedy. The S&P 500 being near all-time highs with a CAPE ratio of 41 is not the environment in which he sees bad news creating genuine bargains.But markets do not stay expensive forever. Corrections happen. Bear markets happen. When fear eventually does push quality assets to prices well below their long-term value, Buffett’s seven words will be as relevant as they were in 2008 or any other moment of maximum investor anxiety. The investors who will benefit most are those who have already decided what they want to own and what they would pay for it, so that when the bad news comes, they are ready to treat it the way Buffett always has: as an opportunity.Related: Warren Buffett doubles down on stock market message for 2026

Wall Street expects President Donald Trump’s call that the Iran cease-fire is over will hurt airlines and home builders more than it will help oil companies.

Mercedes-Benz (MBGAF) has reported an 8% year-on-year decline in Q2 car sales, with an especially significant 30% drop in China, one of its largest markets by volume. Elsewhere, sales in North America and Europe increased.For years now, China has been an important profit driver for the German automaker, but the 30% decline in that market has overshadowed growth in other key markets. It adds to growing struggles for German luxury automakers in China, where domestic rivals have rapidly gained ground.Luxury automakers in China have historically relied on strong pricing power and elevated brand cachet, but those advantages have been gradually eroded as domestic automakers offer comparable technology and luxury at much lower prices. This trend has forced luxury brands to revise their strategies to remain competitive.China decline contrasts with growth elsewhereMercedes-Benz Cars sold a total of 417,800 vehicles in Q2 2026, down by 8% overall. Europe (+4%) and North America (+13%) saw increases, but Asia (-27%) was dragged down by China’s poor performance.Mercedes’ Top-End range of cars declined by 10% globally in Q2, the segment that accounts for its most profitable sedans and SUVs. The Core range (-9%) and Entry range (-4%) were also down.More Automotive:BMW’s biggest market is becoming its biggest headacheMercedes wants AMG to become a much bigger profit machine by 2030Mercedes-Benz faces potential U.S. sales banThe company saw a promising improvement in sales of fully electric models, though. The company sold 52,900 of these in Q2, up by 51%.Mercedes attributed the decline in China to “an intensifying competitive environment and the timing of the company’s current product ramp-ups.”The German marque’s performance outside China increased by 5%, indicating that its troubles are largely confined to one major market. 

Mercedes’ Top-End range of cars declined by 10% globally in Q2.Mercedes-Benz

The luxury car market in China is changingGerman automakers are no longer dominating in China as they once did. Not only are local brands proving difficult to compete with, but the spending power of affluent Chinese buyers is also trending downward.A property crisis in China has weakened demand for expensive luxury cars, with real estate values dropping in the region, reports Bloomberg. Car buyers in China looking for the latest new-car technologies and designs also have multiple options from cheaper local brands such as BYD. Related: China’s new EV numbers just delivered strong message to U.S.Chinese manufacturers have priced their vehicles lower than legacy brands, and shorter development cycles allow them to bring the latest tech to market sooner.Mercedes-Benz is not alone in facing these challenging market conditions.BMW lowered its outlook for 2026 after a substantial decline in China sales. Slow sales have also led to Porsche closing four regional dealerships in China, reports CarNewsChina.The drop in sales for Mercedes is part of a larger shift in the industry, not a temporary blip. Winning back China won’t be easyMercedes-Benz still commands premium pricing in major markets across the globe. Demand in Europe and North America remains strong, and it has seen an especially healthy increase in EV sales in Q2. Despite this, the automaker’s future profitability depends on how it responds to what’s unfolding in China. One aspect of this strategy will be adapting models specifically for this market.Mercedes said recently that it was bolstering efforts to produce “100% China-fit products,” according to Reuters. That will include launching more long-wheelbase versions of Mercedes models, as such derivatives are popular in the region.Ultimately, solid growth in North America and Europe can’t entirely offset weakening demand in China. Investors will be watching to see if Mercedes can regain its momentum in China, which may greatly impact its earnings over the remainder of the decade.Related: Tesla is doing in China what it couldn’t do in the U.S.

“Evil Dead Burn,” the latest film in producers Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell’s reimagined “Evil Dead” franchise, has sparked some positive reviews from Rotten Tomatoes critics.

Cathie Wood, head of Ark Investment Management, is known for buying her favorite tech stocks during market pullbacks. That’s exactly what she just did, adding shares of an AI stock after a sharp selloff.In 2025, the flagship Ark Innovation ETF gained 35.49%, far outpacing the S&P 500’s return of 17.88% in the same period. So far this year, Wood’s flagship Ark Innovation ETF (ARKK) is up 2.94% year to date, while the S&P 500 surged 9.33% as of July 8, Yahoo Finance data shows.Wood gained a reputation after the Ark Innovation ETF delivered a 153% return in 2020. But her style also brings painful losses in bearish markets, as seen in 2022, when the Ark Innovation ETF tumbled more than 60%.Those swings have weighed on Wood’s long-term gains. As of July 7, her Ark Innovation ETF has delivered a five-year annualized return of -8.56%, while the S&P 500 has an annualized return of 11.48% over the same period, according to data from Morningstar.Cathie Wood flags ‘the deflationary impact’ of tech innovationWood focuses on high-tech companies across artificial intelligence, blockchain, biomedical technology, and robotics. She thinks these businesses have strong growth potential, though their volatility often causes fluctuations in the Ark’s funds.From 2014 to 2024, the Ark Innovation ETF wiped out $7 billion in investor wealth, according to a March 2025 analysis by Morningstar’s analyst Amy Arnott. That made it the third-biggest wealth destroyer among mutual funds and ETFs in Arnott’s ranking. The analyst hasn’t updated her ranking.Wood believes investors have been focusing on the wrong signals as they assess the outlook for inflation, interest rates, and stocks.In a June 5 post on X, Wood said the bond market is increasingly reflecting the deflationary impact of technological innovation, particularly artificial intelligence, rather than the inflation risks many investors still fear.Wood pointed to the continued flattening of the Treasury yield curve despite a sharp rise in oil prices over the past year. In previous cycles, she noted, an energy shock of that magnitude would have pushed long-term yields higher. Related: Cathie Wood buys $5.5M of surging tech stockWood believes the bond market is “discounting something much more powerful: the deflationary impact of technological innovation, particularly artificial intelligence, which is beginning to increase productivity across broad swaths of the economy.
”She also said easing tensions with Iran and a decline in oil prices could push inflation even lower.”The next phase of this cycle could be characterized by accelerating growth, declining inflation, falling interest rates, and a strengthening U.S. dollar,” Wood said. “That combination would create a remarkably supportive backdrop for innovation-led equities and the technologies driving the next productivity boom.”Not all investors share Wood’s optimism. Over the past 12 months through July 7, the Ark Innovation ETF saw roughly $1.21 billion in net outflows, according to data from ETF research firm VettaFi. 

Over the past 12 months through July 7, the Ark Innovation ETF saw roughly $1.21 billion in net outflows.Bloomberg / Getty Images

Cathie Wood buys $2.1M of CoreWeave stockOn July 7, Wood’s Ark Innovation ETF bought 23,743 shares of CoreWeave Inc. (CRWV), according to Ark’s daily trade information. These shares are valued at approximately $2.1 million based on July 8’s closing price of $90. CoreWeave is an Nvidia-backed cloud infrastructure company that focuses on GPU-powered computing for AI workloads. Its data centers run on Nvidia chips, and major customers include Google (GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT). Wood’s purchase came after CoreWeave stock experienced a brief selloff last week following Meta Platforms’ announcement that it plans to sell excess computing capacity. The move could increase competition for CoreWeave and underscores a key risk facing the stock.More Cathie Wood:Cathie Wood buys $11.5 million of battered tech stockCathie Wood buys $52 million of surging tech stockCathie Wood buys $529.7 million of popular new stockBut shares of CoreWeave have already been under pressure for a while, especially after its weaker-than-expected Q2 revenue guidance. Since CoreWeave’s last earnings day in May, the stock has dropped more than 30%. Moreover, the share price has been cut nearly in half since its June 2025 high.On May 7, CoreWeave reported an adjusted loss of $1.12 per share, wider than analysts’ expectations for a 90-cent loss. Revenue came in at $2.08 billion, topping estimates of $1.97 billion and more than doubling from $981.8 million a year earlier.For the second quarter, CoreWeave projected revenue of $2.45 billion to $2.6 billion. The midpoint of that range fell below Wall Street estimates of $2.69 billion, according to CNBC. The company maintained its full-year 2026 revenue outlook of $12 billion to $13 billion.CoreWeave’s CEO, Mike Intrator, said on the May earnings call that the company has now reached “hyperscale.””We have reached hyperscale with more than 3.5 gigawatts of contracted power, up more than 400 megawatts this quarter alone, with the substantial majority expected to be online by the end of 2027,” he said.CoreWeave is expected to report its upcoming quarterly earnings in August.Wood isn’t the only one who’s bullish on CoreWeave stock. Some analysts also see the recent pullback as an opportunity to buy.Rosenblatt reiterated its buy rating on CoreWeave with a $250 price target, arguing that the stock’s selloff following reports that Meta Platforms is planning an AI cloud business was “a buying opportunity,” The Fly reported.Rosenblatt analysts said there’s no change in demand from hyperscale customers for GPU computing power, adding that GPU shortages remain the norm across the industry. Also, the firm said it does not believe Meta has the right to resell the CoreWeave capacity it has leased through 2032 to third parties.CoreWeave is not in the top 10 holdings of Wood’s Ark Innovation ETF.Top 10 holdings of the Ark Innovation ETF as of July 8, 2026:Tesla Inc. (TSLA) – 10.12%Tempus AI Inc. (TEM) – 5.75%CRISPR Therapeutics AG (CRSP) – 5.39%Robinhood Markets Inc. (HOOD) – 5.02%Shopify Inc. (SHOP) – 4.43%Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) – 4.21%Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX) – 4.00%Coinbase Global Inc. (COIN) – 3.96%Beam Therapeutics Inc. (BEAM) – 3.63%Roblox Corp. (RBLX) – 3.42%Other than buying CoreWeave shares, Wood’s latest trades included adding shares of Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX), Kratos Defense & Security Solutions (KTOS), Recursion Pharmaceuticals (RXRX), Eli Lilly (LLY), Compass Pathways (CMPS), Prime Medicine (PRME), Generate Biomedicines (GENB), and Alamar Biosciences (ALMR).She also trimmed holdings in Alibaba (BABA), Roku (ROKU), Twist Bioscience (TWST), Natera (NTRA), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Illumina (ILMN), Strata Critical Medical (SRTA), Absci (ABSI), Personalis (PSNL), Veracyte (VCYT), Guardant Health (GH), CareDx (CDNA), Adaptive Biotechnologies (ADPT), and BioNTech (BNTX).Related: Popular soda giant closes plant, cuts 175 jobs

The 2026 FIFA World Cup quarterfinals kick off on Saturday with four intriguing confrontations. Past champions Argentina, France, Spain and England are competing.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX released Grok 4.5 on Wednesday, the first artificial intelligence model the company has trained specifically for coding and autonomous agents — and the first tangible product of its $60 billion acquisition of the AI coding startup Cursor, completed just weeks ago.The launch marks a pivotal test of the sprawling, vertically integrated AI empire Musk has assembled over the past six months, and of a strategy that bets developers care less about topping benchmark leaderboards than about speed, cost, and whether a model can actually do the work.”Announcing Grok 4.5, our first model trained specifically for coding and agents,” the company said in a post on X. “It was trained with Cursor and offers frontier intelligence at leading speeds and cost efficiency.”Why Grok 4.5’s pricing strategy matters more than its benchmark scoresSpaceX is not claiming Grok 4.5 is the smartest model in the world. Instead, it is making an economic argument. The company says the model uses half as many tokens per task as comparable models, delivers higher throughput, and costs less than half as much — priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. That undercuts the premium tiers of rivals like Anthropic’s Claude Opus line and OpenAI’s frontier models by a wide margin.Musk framed the positioning candidly. “Our internal assessment is that Grok 4.5 is roughly comparable to Opus 4.7, but much faster,” he wrote on X. “The combination of capability, faster speed and lower cost is what makes it competitive. We are closing the loop on real-world usefulness, not benchmarks. Hardcore engineers at Tesla & SpaceX find Grok 4.5 genuinely useful, which is what actually matters.”That framing is both a philosophy and a hedge. Independent evaluations released Wednesday suggest Grok 4.5 is genuinely competitive but not dominant on raw capability. The benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis ranked the model fourth on its GDPval-AA v2 index of real-world agentic knowledge work, with an Elo score of 1543, “behind only the latest Claude releases from Anthropic.” But the cost figures are where the model stands out. Artificial Analysis measured Grok 4.5 at $0.49 per completed task — “nearly 90% cheaper than the models ahead of it on our leaderboard,” the firm wrote, placing it “clearly on the Pareto frontier for performance versus cost.”For enterprise buyers, that math matters enormously. Agentic workloads — where a model works autonomously for minutes or hours, reading codebases, calling tools, and iterating on its own output — consume tokens voraciously. A model that is 90% cheaper per completed task, even if slightly less capable, changes the calculus for any engineering organization deploying agents across hundreds of developers. Investor Gavin Baker captured the market’s cautious optimism: “Pareto dominant for coding by the numbers. We will see on the all-important vibes.”How the $60 billion Cursor acquisition shaped Grok 4.5’s trainingGrok 4.5 is the first concrete evidence of what SpaceX bought when it acquired Cursor, and the deal itself unfolded in stages. In April, SpaceX struck an unusual arrangement giving it the right to buy the coding startup for $60 billion — or pay billions in fees and compute if it walked away, as Business Insider reported at the time. Days after SpaceX’s record-setting Nasdaq debut in June, the company exercised that right, announcing an all-stock acquisition that CNBC reported is roughly 3.4% dilution at the IPO valuation. SpaceX shares rose 16% on the news.The strategic logic was always about data as much as product. Cursor’s AI-first code editor generates an enormous stream of high-quality interaction data: how expert engineers write, edit, review, and debug code in real production environments. Musk said openly this spring that Cursor interaction data was being fed directly into Grok’s training. Cursor, for its part, got access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer in Memphis — roughly 200,000 Nvidia GPUs with plans to scale toward one million — after publicly acknowledging it had been “bottlenecked by compute.””We’ve partnered with SpaceXAI to train Grok 4.5,” Cursor’s official account posted Wednesday. “It’s our most powerful model yet and the first we’ve built for more than software engineering.” SpaceX says the model reflects that pedigree: it “excels in large codebases and handles long-running tasks that span multiple repositories, hundreds of skills, and a variety of tools” — precisely the messy, multi-file reality of professional software engineering that clean coding benchmarks often fail to capture. Early developer reactions suggest the training paid off. “Ok Grok 4.5 is wild,” posted developer Evan Bacon. “It just built me this rocket tracking app with live data and a 3D globe. I might need a new benchmark after this.”Inside xAI’s turbulent year of scandals, departures, and rebuildingThe polished launch belies how chaotic the road here has been. Grok has spent much of the past year in crisis. In mid-2025, the chatbot generated antisemitic content and at one point called itself “MechaHitler,” episodes covered extensively by NPR and CNN. Earlier this year, its image-generation features allowed users to create sexualized deepfakes, including of children — drawing investigations from the European Commission and Britain’s Ofcom, as the BBC reported, and prompting SpaceX to list the behavior as a business risk in its own IPO filings.The organization behind the model was fracturing, too. All 11 of Musk’s xAI co-founders had departed by the end of March, according to TechCrunch, and Musk publicly conceded that xAI “was not built right [the] first time around,” saying he was rebuilding it “from the foundations up.” Musk himself admitted at a conference this spring that Grok was “currently behind in coding” — a rare public concession from an executive not known for them.Against that backdrop, Grok 4.5 reads as the first product of the rebuilt organization — and the first proof point for the audacious story SpaceX told public market investors. During its IPO roadshow, the company pitched a total addressable market of roughly $28 trillion, with about $26 trillion tied to AI, including a $22.7 trillion “enterprise applications” opportunity. Those numbers strained credulity even by Silicon Valley standards. A competitive, cheap coding model is the most direct route from that narrative to actual revenue, which is why Wednesday’s launch carries weight far beyond a routine model release.Grok 4.5 vs. Claude: the battle for the AI coding marketThe competitive stakes are hard to overstate, because the AI coding market has been consolidating around a single leader — and it isn’t Musk. Even as Cursor’s revenue exploded, its market share was eroding. Spending data from Ramp cited by CNBC showed Cursor’s share of the AI coding category falling from 41% in June 2025 to about 26% by May 2026, while Anthropic came to control roughly half the market. Anthropic also topped CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list this year and, by Artificial Analysis’s own measure, still holds the top spots on agentic performance rankings.That is the gap Grok 4.5 is engineered to close — not by out-thinking Claude, but by underpricing it. The model’s economics create a classic disruption dynamic: if it delivers most of the frontier’s capability at a fraction of the cost per task, price-sensitive enterprise workloads will migrate, and incumbents will face pressure on their most profitable API traffic. The counterargument is that in coding, quality compounds. A model that resolves a complex bug correctly on the first attempt can be cheaper in practice than one that costs half as much per token but requires three tries. That is why Baker’s caveat about “vibes” — the developer community’s shorthand for a model’s felt reliability on real work — will determine more than any launch-day benchmark.There is also a structural question buried in the deal. Cursor built its business on offering developers their choice of models, including Claude and GPT. If Grok becomes the favored child inside Cursor — and Musk was already urging users to “Try out Grok 4.5 in Cursor!” within hours of launch — the product risks alienating the very users whose data made Grok 4.5 possible. Regulators, already scrutinizing Grok on safety grounds in two jurisdictions, may take a keen interest in a company that controls the training data, the model, and a dominant distribution channel simultaneously.What Musk’s trillion-dollar vertical integration bet means for AI’s futureGrok 4.5 also crystallizes what Musk’s frenetic dealmaking was building toward. In February, SpaceX absorbed xAI in a share-exchange merger that CNBC confirmed valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion — the largest merger of all time, valuing SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. The June IPO followed, the biggest in history, and the stock has since surged past $200 from its $135 offering price, vaulting SpaceX past Amazon and Microsoft to become the fourth most valuable company in the United States.The result is a single public company that owns nearly the entire stack: Colossus for training compute, ambitions for orbital data centers to power future scaling, a frontier model in Grok, a distribution channel in Cursor’s developer base, and captive demand from Tesla and SpaceX’s own engineering organizations. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic can fully replicate that integration; both must reach developers through third-party tools, some of which Musk now owns. Whether that concentration proves to be an unassailable moat or a regulatory target — or both — is now one of the defining questions in enterprise AI.The next few weeks will start to answer it. Artificial Analysis says its full Intelligence Index results are forthcoming. Enterprise pilots will reveal whether the token-efficiency claims survive contact with real codebases. And Anthropic, which has answered every serious challenge this cycle with a rapid counter-release, is unlikely to cede the price-performance frontier quietly.But the deeper story of Grok 4.5 may be what it says about where the AI race has moved. For three years, the industry’s scoreboard was intelligence: whose model was smartest. Musk, arriving late and battered, has chosen to compete on a different axis entirely — whose model is cheapest to actually use. It is a telling choice from a man who built his fortune not by inventing the rocket or the electric car, but by relentlessly driving down the cost of making them. If the strategy works, Musk will have done to AI what he did to spaceflight. If it doesn’t, he’ll have spent $60 billion to learn that in software, unlike rockets, the cheapest ride isn’t always the one engineers choose.

It is unclear who is behind the initiative and its sharply discounted gas prices.

It’s been about five years since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy for chronic weight management, but semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and similar drugs, goes back much further.Semaglutide was first synthesized in 2008 after scientists found that saliva extracted from Gila monsters contained a peptide that stimulated insulin release, similar to glucagon-like peptide-1, which does the same in humans, Formblends shared.But human GLP-1 has a half-life of just one to two minutes, while the Gila monster peptide has a half-life of two to four hours. That type of stability made the saliva a viable candidate for further testing, which eventually led to the creation of semaglutide.Ozempic was eventually developed by Novo Nordisk in 2017 to treat type 2 diabetes. The drug’s off-label use for weight loss was noticed by providers and patients almost immediately, and Novo Nordisk responded by developing Wegovy, which also featured the same semaglutide molecule, just at a higher dose.The new half-life was about seven days, enabling once-weekly dosing. Wegovy was approved in 2021, and the rest is history. By 2024, Ozempic became the best-known prescription medication brand in the U.S., according to Formblends.But that only scratches the surface of just how popular GLP-1 medications have become. GLP-1 use in the U.S. reaches new highAbout 11% of U.S. adults took GLP-1 medications for weight loss purposes in 2026, according to the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index.That is more than triple the 3% of adults who reported doing so just two years prior in 2024. And 15% of Americans report having used GLP-1s for weight loss at some point, an increase of nine percentage points. So more than one in 10 American adults is currently using a GLP-1 drug for weight loss, and more than one in seven have used it at some point in the past, the Gallup Index revealed. The results relied on a web survey of 5,065 adults conducted between May 28 and June 5.Obviously, GLP-1s work well, so U.S. obesity is starting to decline.The U.S. obesity rate is down to 36.4% in the U.S. in 2026 from a record high of 39.9% in 2022, according to Gallup.

By 2024, Ozempic became the best-known prescription medication brand in the U.S.Tatsiana Volkava / Getty Images

Brand-name GLP-1 medicines dominate If you have insurance, GLP-1s aren’t that expensive. Patients with diabetes coverage are only on the hook for the typical prescription co-pay, which could range between $25 and $100 a month, according to Sword Health.Some plans now also cover GLP-1s for weight loss. If you have weight loss coverage, patients usually pay between $100 and $300 a month. But without insurance, these drugs are prohibitively expensive, especially the name-brand ones. Without insurance, GLP-1s often cost between $900 and $1,400 a month, or up to $12,000 a year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Still, brand-name medications like Ozempic and Wegovy comprise 68% of current usage, according to Gallup, compared to 19% for compounded or custom-mixed versions of the medicine.However, despite the Food and Drug Administration recently raising concerns about the side effects of unapproved GLP-1s for weight loss, one-third of GLP-1 users have switched from brand-name to compounded or custom-mixed drugs.”While brand-name GLP-1s continue to significantly lead the marketplace, the lower cost of compounded or custom-mixed varieties is fueling a shift away from brand-name choices and is likely making GLP-1s available to broader sectors of the population,” Gallup researchers concluded. “That broader availability — though still limited — may be what’s driving GLP-1 usage higher overall.”Related: Goldman Sachs doubles down on Novo stock target after key event