Wall Street Week is brought to you by OTC Markets Group. OTC Markets' overnight platform for exchange-listed securities, Moon ATS, provides access to global securities in U.S. dollars from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. Eastern, Sunday through Thursday. Learn more at otcmarkets.com slash moon. Moon ATS is operated by OTC Link LLC, a FINRA-registered broker-dealer, and is available only through participating broker-dealers. or else you listen. This is Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston bringing you stories of capitalism. Everyone loves a winner, but can one man win too much? We look at the staggering wealth of the world's first trillionaire, Elon Musk. What does it tell us about the health of our capitalist system? And that trillion dollars in Elon Musk's pocket comes from the IPO of SpaceX, where investors are backing him personally in what looks like the ultimate key man provision. But corporate governance concerns have some institutional investors sitting on the sidelines of the biggest IPO ever. Plus, it's a condition half of all people on Earth will experience. But until recently, menopause has largely gone unmentioned and unaddressed by big business. Now, changes in treatments and in regulation are pointing to a major new healthcare investment opportunity. But we start with the ever-changing media world, as leaders have been meeting this week for the annual Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley. Activate founder and CEO Michael Wolff has spent his career in media, including as president and COO of MTV Networks. So Michael, this week the media conference of Herb Allen out in Sun Valley has been held. Typically, deals come out of that conference. This time we have a couple of big media deals going in, one with Fox and Roku and one with Comcast deciding to spin off NBCU. What do you think the talk is going to be? First of all, it's not just a media conference any longer. A lot of it is tech. You're going to be the head of all the major tech companies and the heads of all the major AI companies. I think there may be some other deals that will come out of it. And they're going to be, the conversations are going to be everything about video streaming, big media deals, AI, sports. It's all going to come together and all these people have a stake in it. Start with Fox Roku because some people said, what are they doing buying Roku? Well, first of all, Fox has been the most disciplined of all the media and entertainment companies in this age of streaming. really totally avoided the streaming arms race. So they bought a couple years ago, they bought Tubi in 2020, $440 million, probably one of the best media deals of the last decade. Today, it's doing over a billion dollars in revenue. And it's all about free advertiser supported television. 86% of American households today are paying for streaming. You only have about 50% that are watching free advertiser-supported television. And they have the largest service in that. They have almost 100 million users. So that's their starting place. They buy Roku. Roku has 100 million homes in the U.S. that are using the Roku operating system. 28% of all connected TVs in the U.S. go through Roku. They have the Roku channel, which itself is about 80 million users. And so here they have, they own the channel, they own the box, they own the software, they own the data, and they own the advertising. And so this deal makes a huge amount of sense, and it takes them out of the business of competing with everybody else in terms of buying big programming, paying for customer acquisition, retention, and worry about where the next subscriber is going to come from. So think about exactly that point. You, for a long time, have been telling me, watch the free advertiser-supported streaming coming up. But that works better for some content than for others. I mean, news and sports, it may work well for. I'm not sure it works well for the blockbuster Netflix mega show. Well, it doesn't have to work for the mega show. You've got shows like, so for example, on Tubi, you've got shows like Empire. And you've got movies like Twilight. A lot of this is not news or sports. A lot of this is largely scripted programming that both series and films that wouldn't ordinarily be on the major streaming services. Or if they are, they're on a streaming service and then they're on Tubi, Roku, or Pluto for free. Even with the Roku acquisition, Fox remains a much smaller media company than a Disney or a Netflix. Not to speak of Paramount, the Warner Brothers. Can it compete in that world? I think we're moving to a point where focus is more important. I think size is not as important. And in these media conglomerates, some of them will work and some of them won't. But Fox is very focused, and it's focused on businesses that throw off cash. It's one of the reasons why it's been the absolute best-performing media stock. And the result of it is just very disciplined, not going after the battle on streaming, and sticking to businesses like television stations and a network and cable networks, and now Tubi, that throw off cash. When you talk about focus, I think about Brian Roberts and Comcast, the other big deal here. By the way, I did this if you look at the track of the stock of the two companies, Fox versus Comcast, over the last five years. They're almost inverses of one another. So why is Brian Roberts finally throwing in the towel and saying, let's break it up? You're asking the right question, David, because they're not really throwing in the towel. They're taking this business and essentially earlier they spun off the cable networks in Diversant and they're creating three different companies, each of them with different competitive dynamics, different growth profiles and different economics. So by simplifying the business, the core connectivity business can make the capital investments it wants. Investors aren't worried. Are they going to spend on more plant and equipment versus are they going to spend on the next series? So it's very focused. And also, connectivity has become like a bundle. You don't just buy connectivity at home. You buy connectivity. You buy cable. You buy mobile. You buy other services from them. So that business is focused. In terms of the NBC Universal, well, this is a growth business. They're going to be able to go deeper and deeper into some of the areas that they're in today. They're doing unbelievably well as your sports destination. It's a default if you want sports. I don't think you can get sports, unless you're watching NBC or you're subscribing to Peacock or both. For somebody who's been around this for a while now, streaming seems like a brand new thing. But it's rapidly looking like an old thing compared to what's next, which is AI and tech. Takes us back to the Allen Conference and the other half of the Allen Conference. What can we expect in terms of media and tech? The AI guys are investing over $700 billion next year in plant equipment and capital. And they've suddenly realized that content is a critical asset for them, that it is a foundational asset. So they're all going to be trying to do deals with the content companies, first of all, around anything that is information or news. So that's why we saw earlier this year, we saw News Corp just do a deal with Meta. We're going to see lots more of those deals with content companies. The days are over where the user is just going to be happy with them scraping the web or going to Wikipedia. And then at the same time, they all want a piece of the, they all want a piece of the video creation business. And so right now Google has Veo, which is being used by studios and others to not just convert films, but make new programming. So everyone's going to be trying to figure out how they're going to go from the LLM, the query model, into one that it helps people create content. With each one of these steps, I wonder whether the margins don't get squeezed more. The size goes up, including internationally, globally. But the margin goes down. Back in the good old days, I would say, you owned a major market television station, the margins were really big. WBCT, the first time I went there and got access to it, it was 60% profit margins. With each one of these, you may have a deal with the AI people to be able to use their content, but isn't it going to be pennies on the dollar? It's really turning out to be a world of have and have nots. If you have a high share station in a good market, you're making a lot of money. If you are a low share station, no matter what the market, you're not making a lot of money. And so TV station business is still a great business. It's slowed down because of what's the decline of cable. But in some of these businesses, the margins are going to decline. And the street, when the street looks at these media and entertainment companies, the street needs to be convinced that streaming is going to be a good business. And it's one that's going to ultimately be a high margin business. And right now, it doesn't look that way. To come back to deals and what might or might not come out of the Allen Conference, the AI people are spending a lot of money on data centers and on compute, right? A lot of money. Are they interested in actually buying a major media company? I really doubt it. I think that maybe on the information side, because information is so critical, but those deals are going to be easier for them to make those deals. And any of the information companies would be very glad to take a piece of the $700 billion that's going to be spent. I do think that there's going to be more soft deals. I think there will be investment in these different businesses because I don't think that they have a choice. So you spend your days advising a lot of these companies for their strategies and how to approach this uncertain world. Who's going to win? And I don't mean for you to say which name of which company, but the winner will do what? And the ones who don't win will have failed to do what? I think the winners will be the people that have the best programming or the best information and the best sports. So programming, they can own. Sports, they're going to have to have those rights. and sports is huge driver of the entire ecosystem. It's why NBC is moving towards the year-round Sundays. So entertainment, long-form scripted, reality, whatever it might be, this is really what drives people. It's going to drive that over five hours a day of people in the U.S. watching video. It's going to be sports. It's going to be information. And then finally, it's going to be data. and that people have, in order to be able to serve advertising that's going to help advertisers and marketers sell, there needs to be data. And that's a piece of the Fox-Roku deal that also we shouldn't forget, which is that Fox gets a huge amount of data through Roku that informs its own advertising. Coming up, spend a dollar every second for 31,000 years. That's what a trillionaire would have to do to go through all his money. It's a lot of money, but what does it mean for the rest of us? Wall Street Week is brought to you by OTC Markets Group. Thinking about joining the exploding overnight market space, but unsure where to start? Designed to meet the needs of a growing international investor base, OTC Markets' overnight platform for exchange-listed securities, Moon ATS, provides access to global securities in U.S. dollars from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. Eastern, Sunday through Thursday. Extend your trading day and trade global securities in U.S. dollars through a FINRA-licensed broker-dealer. In the first half of 2026, over $28.1 billion U.S. dollars traded on Moon ATS. Learn more about Moon ATS. Visit otcmarkets.com slash moon. Moon ATS is operated by OTC Link LLC, a FINRA-registered broker-dealer. Get the latest news from around the world delivered to you in an instant. Subscribe to Bloomberg News Now and get news when you want it on your schedule These are short audio reports on the day top stories that you can listen to in just a few minutes Make Bloomberg News Now your trusted source for the latest global headlines with context It's available 24 hours a day, anytime you need it, right on your smartphone or smart speakers. Subscribe to Bloomberg News Now today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. This is a story of unimaginable wealth. Elon Musk is now a trillionaire, but the story is about more than one person's enormous fortune. It's about how markets reward capital, how our tax system treats it, and how much power can accumulate at the very top. I give SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all, to be clear. In fact, I told people this. I said, look, we're probably going to fail, but, you know, we should give it a try. SpaceX made history last month with the biggest ever IPO. Raising $75 billion on a market value of nearly $2 trillion. More than double that of Saudi Aramco's $29 billion listing in 2019. Encouraging more of that type of innovation in the American economy rather than less of it seems important. But also trying to make sure that we are fiscally responsible and disciplined. SpaceX is now one of the most valuable public companies in the world, putting its founder and CEO into a category all his own, the world's first trillionaire. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman points out, public markets are turning ownership stakes into staggering concentrations of wealth. Until recently, we've been talking about income. And we mostly talk about the top 20 percent or even the top 1 percent. But wealth is a whole different story, and wealth is really where the action is. So it's wealth, top 1%, it totally dominates wealth, but it's the inequality within the top 1%. It's the top 10th of a percent or the top .001 or whatever that is, just a handful of people. Elon Musk, obviously, is the best known. But really, if you look at the top 10 people in the United States, there's an incredible amount of wealth there, and that is relatively new. So even in the year 2000, we were already talking about the 1%, but this 10 billionaires, 10 mega billionaires, that's a new story. And at this scale, the numbers start to outrun the language we use to describe them. These numbers, like billions, hundreds of billions, trillions, you start to not even be able to realize or understand what the magnitudes really mean or demand of the American economy. To fully comprehend how much a trillion dollars is, Yale law professor and co-founder of the Budget Lab, Natasha Saron, offers a different way to measure it. A million seconds is about 11 and a half days. A billion seconds is about 32 years. A trillion seconds is 31,700 years. That is roughly back to when humans first began painting cave walls. And so a trillion dollars is just such an astounding and significant sum that it is almost hard to grasp what it means. With a trillion dollars, Elon Musk could buy every carmaker in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, like GM, BMW, and Toyota, which total around $900 billion, and still have nearly $100 billion left over. NASA's budget for 2025 was $24.6 billion, meaning Musk could fund the space agency 41 times over. And if Musk were his own country, his territory as of now would be richer than 156 other nations. He sits at number one on Bloomberg's billionaire index, followed by former Google CEO Larry Page with $314 billion, one-third of Musk's net worth. But Musk is not the only one benefiting. SpaceX's IPO has created thousands of new millionaires inside the company. And the next wave of wealth creation may already be on its way as more technology companies, especially those tied to artificial intelligence, move toward the public markets. Both Anthropic and OpenAI filed for IPOs in June, with estimated valuations already pushing that trillion-dollar mark. Big tech is driving so much of the stock market, for example, right now, and these mega-IPOs are AI-related in one shape or another. How much of it is tech? A lot of it is tech. Used to be, not that long ago, we would think, we used to say Wall Street was really driving this, although now it really is tech. The ranks of the super rich, aside from being enormously richer than they used to be, they're also much more sort of monochromatic than they used to be. Often, with great fortune comes political influence. The Doja influence will only grow stronger. I liken it to a sort of Buddhism. It's like a way of life. So it is permeating throughout the government. In 2025, President Trump put Musk in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in which government agencies suffered massive financial and employee cuts. As more people cross into billionaire territory, and now possibly trillionaire territory, Krugman says the question becomes larger than net worth. It becomes a question about democracy. The Times did a report saying that 300 billionaire families accounted for something like 19 percent of campaign contributions in 2024. And that's only the explicit stuff that's counted by the Federal Elections Commission. If you count all of the invisible channels of influence, well, if you have that much wealth at the top, it does make us, in a meaningful sense, a less democratic nation. Musk's trillion-dollar milestone is historic, but it's not the first time American capitalism created a new financial class. Just over a century ago, John D. Rockefeller became the country's first billionaire through his controlling stake in Standard Oil. The Rockefellers in the early 20th century were really rich. John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, he crossed the one billion mark in the 1910s. And when you adjust that for the share of the U.S. economy, he's about at a trillion dollars. So right now, basically 120 years after the first billionaire, we have the first trillionaire sort of hitting basically that same mark in terms of the U.S. economy. Bloomberg reporter Ben Steverman has covered Elon Musk's rise and has seen some similarities between the first billionaire and the first trillionaire, but also some key differences. The Rockefellers did not want to be known as billionaires. They already felt like they had a target on their back. They were in control of this monopoly that was incredibly controversial. A case against them went all the way to the Supreme Court and they lost. So they did not want to be known as billionaires. That sounds different from now. I'm not sure that Elon Musk is that upset about being called a trillionaire. It wasn't just John D. Rockefeller. There was a gilded age and there were Carnegies and there were other people who had a lot of money. Was it a different sort of societal reaction? Yeah, I think there was the Gilded Age in the late 19th century and early 20th century, but the progressive era was coming in, and that level of wealth just became incredibly controversial. That level of power in society became very controversial. It was in the time of the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Vanderbilts that the 16th Amendment was ratified, giving Congress the power to tax incomes from whatever source derived. laying the foundation for our modern income tax system. But today's large fortunes are not built mainly from income. They are built through ownership stakes, stock appreciation, and capital gains. There was no conception of a trillionaire then. Yeah. Was this system set up for trillionaires? You can kind of trace its roots back to concerns about inequality in the first Gilded Age. You know, concerns that there was wealth that was being concentrated in these American oligarchs that we didn't actually have a good handle on how to tax because of the restrictions with respect to the ability to tax income and issues dealing with apportionment that dated back to the Civil War. But it was exactly in response to the needs of the FISC to finance itself and concerns about inequality and its rapid growth in society. And so in some sense, you're kind of seeing the same movie play again, except it turns out that the income tax doesn't seem exceptionally well situated to be able to tackle the nature of inequality in this country because the income tax is a tool that's leaving out of its tax base something like 40% of the wealth of those at the very top. And so a bit I have wondered whether one way to understand the sort of ideas that are being put forth with respect to things like wealth taxation or mark-to-market taxation of capital gains, whether this is the new income tax movement in some sense in this country. The tax system, though, actually has a disincentive to freeing up capital, does it not? Because if you're only going to have to pay on returns, and when you realize, when you sell the asset or otherwise transfer the asset, then you just tend to sit on the asset and it's not freed up. If you look at the way the system is structured, it is structured such that there is a huge incentive for Elon Musk to transfer his ownership stake in Tesla and SpaceX and X to his heirs rather than to transfer it potentially during his lifetime. Taxes on wealth or on capital income are a real way to curb this. You have corporations paying almost no tax with no tax, passing their profits on to one way or another to people who own stock, who then pay little or no tax. So we really have exacerbated this inequality. It's because so much wealth is generated by appreciated capital rather than high incomes that California is now considering the Billionaire Tax Act, which would impose a one-time levy on residents worth over $1 billion. But unlike during the first Gilded Age, Americans in recent years have had a more nuanced view of the ultra-wealthy getting even richer. You don't see a lot of anger, actually, in the polling at billionaires until fairly recently. So that indicates to me that the average American actually kind of wants to be rich themselves. I think it becomes a problem for a lot of Americans when there's a sense that the system's rigged or that the people at the top are somehow manipulating things to make their lives harder. How much of this is, forgive me, envy? suppose we all had a minimum income, everybody in the country, that was sufficient. Would we feel better about inequality? We would feel better about inequality if we had the basics, we're sure. If everybody had health care, if everybody had a roof over their heads, if everybody had sufficient nutrition, which, by the way, we don't. The thing to say about that is that doing that is quite expensive. I think that there's something fundamentally skewed, demoralizing, corrupting about really extreme inequality. I think a society in which, essentially a society in which there's trillionaires, is not going to be a good society even if everybody has the basics. But, you know, if we could take a step towards making sure that everybody had the basics, then that would deprogress. Capitalism rewards winners, those who innovate and create successful businesses and help grow the economy overall. But as those rewards soar beyond our wildest imagination, the question becomes whether there can be too much of a good thing. No billionaires! No trillionaires! Whether the system can provide those lavish rewards without leaving the vast majority of us behind. And ultimately, whether the growing gap could put democracy itself at risk. Up next, the SpaceX launch hasn't just created large gaps in wealth. It's also created large gaps in the power of the shareholders investing in the company. Gaps that have led some to question whether it's the right investment for them. Wall Street Week is brought to you by OTC Markets Group. Thinking about joining the exploding overnight market space, but unsure where to start? Designed to meet the needs of a growing international investor base, OTC Markets' overnight platform for exchange-listed securities, Moon ATS, provides access to global securities in U dollars from 8 p to 4 a Eastern Sunday through Thursday Extend your trading day and trade global securities in U dollars through a FINRA broker In the first half of 2026 over billion U dollars traded on Moon ATS Learn more about Moon ATS. Visit otcmarkets.com slash moon. Moon ATS is operated by OTC Link LLC, a FINRA-registered broker-dealer. Get essential news on the people and companies pushing the tech sector to new frontiers. Hi, I'm Ed Ludlow. Join me for Bloomberg Tech, a daily podcast focused exclusively on technology, innovation and the future of business. Every weekday, we bring you the latest insights on Silicon Valley's top companies and conversations with tech's biggest decision makers. Listen to Bloomberg Tech on your commute home and stay ahead of the news cycle. Subscribe today on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. This is a story about fairness. When SpaceX went public last month, investors were invited to buy into one of the world's most valuable companies, but they weren't buying equal voting rights. Instead, the IPO cemented Elon Musk's extraordinary control over the company's future, giving him more voting power than all other shareholders combined, as well as locking him in as chairman and CEO. SpaceX, as a public company, is an investment in Elon Musk and the cult of Elon. Well, you know, I visited SpaceX. It's extraordinary. It's extraordinary what they've done. This has captured the imagination, not just of investors, but really everyone. The reality is it's going to be a watershed event in terms of the space sector for Musk. Our job as institutional investors is to take calculated risk. And in the case of SpaceX, we simply could not make the numbers add up. Historically, public companies were simple manners where each share gave the holder one vote, something still true for companies like Apple. But some founders decided that they needed and deserved a more than equal say in the running of the company, giving rise to two classes of shares, with some shares attached to multiple votes. A dual-class share structure, which is the case for companies like Alphabet and Meta. Lise Beyer is an IPO advisor and the founder of Class 5 Group. She says one advantage of the dual-class structure is that it allows companies to get their sea legs as they adjust to being public. The biggest thing is actually keeping activists away when the stock falls. And so what that means is founders can make decisions that may actually have a negative impact on the near term without fear that if the stock falls on that news, someone will swoop in and take it away. From an investor's perspective, it's a double-edged sword. Investors, on one hand, can rightly feel, you're taking my money, I want to vote. On the other hand, investors, no matter how savvy they are, don't actually know what's going on inside a company. The dual-class structure provides a safety net for those investors who want to let management make the decisions they deem will work out best in the long run without fear of losing their jobs if, in fact, there's a short-term hiccup. The dual-class share structure gained prominence with Ford's landmark 1956 IPO, allowing the Ford family to retain control even as the number of public shareholders grew. A similar two-class model was adopted by some media companies, like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Fox. But what was once the exception is rapidly becoming the rule today. In 1980, just over 1% of IPOs used dual-class structures. By last year, that figure had climbed to 47%. They were not coming in any other kind of public stock until Google came along in 2004, where the founders had some very specific ideas of how they wanted to run the company. This paved the way for SpaceX to file for an IPO under an unusually extreme dual-share structure. While Musk holds just over 40% of the company's equity, he controls over 80% of the total voting power. Lucien Bebchik is director of the Corporate Governance Program at Harvard Law School. What we have here goes much beyond just letting Musk determine the business strategy for some time. First of all, even if you believe that Musk is now by far the best to choose the business strategy of the company, this doesn't mean trusting how we will then allocate the pie that is generated by the company between public investors and himself. himself. One key role of corporate governance arrangements is to constrain insiders from allocating to themselves an excessive slice of the pie at the expense of public investors. There's also the question, even if you believe wholeheartedly in Elon Musk today, Elon Musk may not be there or be the same Elon Musk 30, 40 years down the road. Yes, David, here you are completely correct. Furthermore, the governance structure that entrenches control in the hands of whoever has the B shares is indefinite, which means that if Elon Musk or when Elon Musk passes away, we are all mortal, then investors cannot rely on Musk's hairs or whoever manages the trust through which his high voting shares are held, that they would be the most fitting leaders. And then there's the question of how to ensure that a superstar CEO remains fully committed to the company over which he has nearly complete control. Something that's been an issue before for Mr. Musk at his other venture, Tesla. A similar concern arises in connection with SpaceX because even though in the governance structure of SpaceX, there is an ironclad commitment to have Musk in the CEO and chair positions, there are no constraints whatsoever on how much time and effort he will spend outside SpaceX. SpaceX. The world is well aware of the extraordinary SpaceX governance structure, and it gives some potential investors pause. Anders Schelde is the chief investment officer of Akademiker Pension, a Danish pension fund that manages more than $20 billion in assets, primarily on behalf of academics. It recently placed SpaceX on an exclusion list for investments, specifically citing the company's catastrophic governance. Maybe the Elon Musk brand is very strong in the US, but it's not so strong in Denmark. Actually, I would rather say that, you know, many people driving a Tesla is maybe a little bit embarrassed about it. And certainly among our scheme members, there's a huge reputational risk in investing in an Elon Musk led company. So I've been here for nine years now, and I never experienced in my nine years as CIO so many scheme members coming back to me with positive comments from a single investment decision, as I experienced in the wake of the exclusion of SpaceX. What do you look for in governance, either to have or to avoid as you make investments? We hold good governance very, very highly. We think it's extremely important in order to assure accountability and transparency and sound decision-making. And I think good governance, to us, to our mind, really lies at the core of the trust that we need in public markets. One share, one vote. The distribution of power should be proportional to the money invested. We have the separation of power between CEO and chairman of the board. We don't like that to be the same person. We think that creates a risk of poor decision making and excessive risk taking. And finally, the third principle is independence. We want an independent board. Do you see a trend, or are you concerned about a trend, with the success of SpaceX that other companies may follow suit with respect to corporate governance? Definitely the fear that this might inspire others to go in the same direction. We could be heading in that direction of even further concentration of power with a few founders in some very, very major companies. And I think that is, in that environment, it's important that we as institutional investors try and pull in the other direction to get the balance right. When the balance so unevenly favors one person's interests, what power do the rest of the shareholders have? After all, it is also their money that's on the line. Investors do have one really important tool at their disposal. They don't like what's going on, they can sell the stock. That's their point of leverage. Retail investors, to be quite honest, don't have much of a say anyway because most of them don't have enough voting power to make a difference. So should they care? Sure, because there should be some forcing functions on management teams to remember that they have sold stock to the public in return for committing to run the business like a public company. Ultimately, it will be for markets to decide whether that balance of power is fair for all shareholders or tilts too far toward the founders. As always, the markets speak most loudly through the value put on the stock. And at least at the beginning, Elon Musk is not facing too much pressure, given SpaceX's initial market cap of over $2 trillion. Whatever value you estimate and you attach to the business prospects of SpaceX, you need, as an investor, to discount it significantly because of the governance flows. Did the market provide such an adequate discount? We cannot tell from what we see in the market, but I think it would be important for public investors to do so. And I hope, David, that this interview might help a little bit in informing public investors about this issue to which they should pay close attention. Up next, the growing business of treating menopause and how a change in FDA rules has given it new life. securities in U.S. dollars from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. Eastern, Sunday through Thursday. Extend your trading day and trade global securities in U.S. dollars through a FINRA-licensed broker-dealer. In the first half of 2026, over $28.1 billion U.S. dollars traded on Moon ATS. Learn more about Moon ATS. Visit otcmarkets.com slash moon. Moon ATS is operated by OTC Link LLC, a FINRA-registered broker-dealer. As markets move and headlines break, what matters most is context. A Bloomberg subscription gives you unmatched reporting, sharp analysis, and powerful tools that help you connect the dots. Subscribers get unlimited access to Bloomberg.com and the Bloomberg app, including exclusive stories, premium markets tools, Bloomberg television, and podcasts, all in one place. Make smarter moves with the global benchmark for business news. Learn more at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. This is a story about market failure, failure of the markets to address something half of the world's population will experience, but has historically been largely ignored, menopause. For generations, women were told the physiological changes that come with aging were something they should endure quietly if they were told anything at all. Now that silence is being broken by doctors, celebrity influencers, startups, and investors who see menopause as one of the next big markets in women's health. Our colleague Scarlett Fu brings us the story It healthcare for half the world Menopause is hot It is a billion category The plain wrong part was it all over it menopause Go to the corner, sit in the rocking chair and pull out your knitting needles. That's changed significantly now. Menopause is finally getting its big business moment after decades of being overlooked. Beauty brands, supplement makers, telehealth startups and investors are all racing to stake their claim on a growing market to provide relief to women whose ovaries stop producing estrogen. But this gold rush raises a key question. Which products and services actually help versus those cashing in on confusion? We developed a report on the biggest on-met needs in women's health last year and established a $360 billion ghost market. For Carly Saper, the opportunity is clear. Menopause often hits during women's peak earning years, driving more than $150 billion in global productivity losses and underscoring one of the biggest white spaces in women's health. The market for menopause is specifically a huge market. There's 75 million women in the U.S. today going through menopause. Just by comparison, there's only 400,000 IVF cycles in the U.S. today. And that doesn't mean IVF is a bad place to invest. It just means the solutions have to be relatively expensive for the market size to be venture-backable. Whereas in menopause, even a relatively low-cost solution, if it's effective, can have a venture outcome. For Naomi Watts, that market gap started as something very personal. At the age of 36, the Oscar-nominated actress was at the precipice of fame, starring in films like Mulholland Drive. I can't believe it. I'm just so excited to be here. The Ring, and King Kong. Then she received an unexpected diagnosis. I wasn't getting pregnant, and so a friend said, why don't you go to your doctor and get a blood panel? And I was like, what's a blood panel? I really was so clueless. She said, check your hormones. And I went, okay. So my gynecologist did exactly that, and he then told me the results were looking like I was close to menopause. That diagnosis collided with an industry that has often treated aging women as expendable. There are many times you're told that, you know, you get to a certain age and you're not sexy anymore. And this was told to me. I started my career late and they said, you better get your skates on because, you know, you haven't got many years left. I said, what do you mean? Why? And they said, well, you know, it sort of all finishes at 40. Why? Well, because you're not sexy after that. Why? Getting angrier by the second. Because you're, and you might need to bleep this, unf***able. It would take years for Watts to speak openly about what she was going through. I spent a lot of time feeling the fear and shame and panic about it. And very lonely. I tried to connect with other women. And they would sort of laugh it off and say, oh, don't be silly. You're not in menopause. you're far too young. So the more I sort of tried to connect with people and not get the reaction that I wanted, which was compassion and comfort, it just sort of made me retreat further. It really took 10 years and probably entering into my 50s for me to own that and say, I'm in menopause. I need help. Why do you think menopause has become a consumer category now in the mid-2020s? I think it's in large part thanks to women like Naomi, who have kind of come out of the shadows and shouted from the rooftop and said no more. Watts eventually turned her experience into Stripes, a wellness platform aimed at women in perimenopause and menopause. Kara Kamenev is the CEO of Stripes. How do you build a women's wellness brand that empowers women without monetizing on everything that they might be feeling? This is a pro-aging brand and it was born that way. It wasn't changed to be that because it became trendy. This was born out of a very personal moment of like, I need care, I'm not getting care. And at the same time, we don't want to change who women are and we don't want to lie to them. We do see a lot of kind of legacy brands in the industry who are changing tune. For years, all of the products said, erase time, turn back the clock. They call these age spots. Or the ads had 25-year-old women and they were purporting to erase 25 years of time. And it was just ridiculous. That's never really been the Stripes proposition. It's about feeling the best that you can feel, embracing where you're at, but improving what you can and being comfortable and confident and happy and supported. Stripes is just one company in a menopause market that is getting more crowded by the day. Even so, investment dollars in women's health barely register. Of the almost $2.9 trillion in funding that investors plowed into the healthcare sector in the first half of the decade, women's health companies received less than 1% of the total. As the menopause economy expands with new products and increased visibility, who is setting the standard for what actually works? It should be American physicians in the medical community. And number two, the FDA, which has a very distinct role mandated by Congress to ensure that if a product makes a medical claim about improving your health, that that claim has to be supported by data. Marty McCary served as FDA commissioner from March 2025 to May 2026. The former surgeon and professor began his tenure at the FDA intent on reversing long-held medical dogma around the risks of hormone replacement therapy. That reversal became official last November. I'm curious about the overall history of HRT. What were the early days of HRT like? It was extremely popular. Women were experiencing the life-changing benefits in terms of their health. Living longer and feeling better with hormone replacement therapy. In 2002, a study came out linking HRT to breast cancer, stroke, and blood clots. The number, of course, fell from 40% of women using HRT down to about 4% in the mid-2010s. As long as I've been in medicine, I've heard this dogma, this dictum, that women should avoid hormone replacement therapy after they go through menopause. Researchers said that a study claimed that there was an increased risk of breast cancer, suggesting that a woman had an increased risk of dying of breast cancer. It turns out the study didn't really represent the opportunity that women have to benefit from hormone therapy. But regardless, the FDA piled on with some scary warnings in 2003. And so for the last 22 years before we tackled this at the FDA, women had been talked out of it. But the mantra that women should avoid it at all costs took on a life of its own and sadly scared away a generation of women. and some call it the lost generation. Approximately 50 million women over 23 years who were denied, talked out of, or never offered hormone replacement therapy because of that dogma in the field. I consider it to be one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine. So during his brief tenure, McCary took a major step towards fixing this. I immediately convened experts and tackled this issue, and we told women the truth nationwide. We removed black box warnings that were not supported by the data. And we described the profound short-term and long-term health benefits that ultimately are good for public health. I think there's a lot of relief because so many women who are experiencing the symptoms are really relying on the FDA to tell them if they should be taking HRT or not, are now going to see that they should access HRT and have the care that they deserve and need. Under McCary, the FDA's move helped to advance a medical conversation stunted by stigmatization over the past two decades. Just in the past five years, progesterone-containing HRT prescriptions for women aged 45 and older have more than tripled, and prescribing rates have increased more than 19 percent since the FDA's label change. And in the past, this was a taboo topic. Women would be embarrassed to talk about it. If they brought it up with their doctor, they would sort of be dismissed. And now you're seeing a national conversation emerge where very respected leaders around the world are saying, look, when I go through menopause in the next few years, this is what I intend to do. Or this has changed my life. The FDA's actions may be helping to remove some of the stigma of menopause, but the health care industry has to catch up in preparing professionals to address women's changing needs. Only 20% of residency programs in the U.S. have a formal menopause track. So we're seeing that providers are lacking education on how to treat women going through menopause. This is a huge gap that allows for innovation to come in by democratizing access to menopause care. There are very few people trained in the science and medicine of midlife care for women. And essentially, they treat you the wrong way. So the opportunity that I saw was to create a company that would give great women's health care, focusing on hormones, to women covered by insurance. Because it shouldn't be that you have to go to a concierge doctor like I did and pay $1,500 in order to get this care. That idea became MidiHealth, a telehealth company started by Joanna Strober, focused on midlife women's health care. It reached a $1 billion valuation back in February, the first menopause company to do so. I was around in my late 40s. I was suffering from anxiety and heart issues and gaining weight, all the things. I went to a primary care provider, and that primary care provider sent me to therapy. They gave me a sleep test and said that I had perhaps sleep apnea. They also gave me an antidepressant medication. So I eventually, after about a year, found a concierge doctor who was specialist in women's health. And within two weeks, she cleared up all of the issues that I was experiencing. We're sending people to get colonoscopies. We're sending people to get blood tests. But we're basically creating a care layer of expert women's health providers. None of that requires in-person. It can all be done online. How do you separate durable medical demand from the hype and the excitement that surrounds menopause? 35 and 65 is one of the biggest care gaps that we have. Essentially, there's a lot of focus on babies, and then there's a lot of focus on geriatric care. And we have this huge gap of care in between. And what people have realized is that this gap of women has been dramatically underserved. What do investors misunderstand about menopause? And how do you think that that's evolved or changed over the years? So I think there's a perspective that menopause is a moment, and you're going to take care of people in that moment. But we've learned that menopause care is, it's both symptoms and preventive care for a 30 year period of time. So women might come to us in their 30s, having had a baby and their hair is falling out and they're having some anxiety. They come to us in their 40s because they're having symptoms of perimenopause and menopause. They're not sleeping, they're having anxiety. And then in their 50s, they're worried about their bones and they're worried about cardiovascular disease and what can I do to age healthier? So we're finding women start with us for one thing, and they stay with us for many, many years. The same conditions that make menopause a promising market also make it a confusing one. As products, clinics, and wellness claims multiply, the challenge for women will be figuring out what kind of help they can trust. There are many companies out there claiming to treat menopause symptoms, either in the short term or in the long term. What should women look for in buying certain products? How do they distinguish between something that's real versus something that just claims to do the trick? I think in every industry, there are products out there that just don't survive because they don't live up to the claims. Look for the FDA brand. It's one of the greatest brands in the world. A product does not have that brand. I'd run it by your doctor. That does it for us here at Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston. See you next week for more stories of capitalism. The Bloomberg This Weekend Podcast. News, analysis, and the lighter side of Bloomberg. Including our weekly news quiz. Mattel reported higher than expected first quarter revenue thanks to the demand for which toy car brand? Hot Wheels. Hot Wheels. Hot Wheels, yes! Are those still a thing? I've stepped on many of those with my children when they were young. Yeah, slaves and those are not awesome. They hurt very much on bare feet. Yeah. The Bloomberg This Weekend Podcast. Subscribe today on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
