Morning Brew Daily - Nvidia Buys Hugging Face for $12.9B & Pharma Companies are Bullish on Baldness

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

#926: Tesla teases the long-awaited Cybercab and is ready to share more details. Nvidia acquires AI startup Hugging Face in a massive deal valued at $13B. Drugmakers are now shifting to a new spot that promises much growth…baldness. Burning Man is underway but…is it still the free-spirited event it once was? Finally, the iconic feminist icon Gloria Steinem passes away at 92.  Learn more at https://go.amex/morningbrew  If you’re in NYC, come to our run club on 9/16: https://www.morningbrew.com/runclub Come to our trivia night! https://mbdtrivianight-september2026.splashthat.com/  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marketers, tell us if this sounds familiar. You invest in something that seems incredible like millions of views, but then don't see any revenue. Instead, invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest row ads of all major ad networks. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash MBD. That's LinkedIn.com slash MBD. Terms and conditions apply.

Good morning, Brut Daily. show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, why balding treatments could be the next pharma gold mine. Then did the official launch of the Tesla cyber cab wow or disappoint? It's Friday, September 4th. Let's ride. Good morning. Labor Day weekend is here. The glorious three days that mark the unofficial transition from summer to fall. The brew office is closed on Monday, Labor Day itself. So we taped a special interview episode to tide you over. tune in to find out who the mystery guest is. So be, among other things this weekend,

marks the return of a full slate of college football games. And I, for one, am already hyped. Last night, my hometown team of UMass pulled off one of the greatest upsets of all time in the sport, crushing Rutgers, despite being 29 and a half point underdogs. UMass did not win a single game last year. Watching you see that score go up, It was like a kid in a candy shop.

You had so much joy in your face, so much joy in fact that I got a little bit jealous because I do not have a college team to call my own. Famously, Marquette and Brown are not exactly powerhouse football programs. So the last couple of years, I have been asking our listeners to weigh in and give me a good college football team to support. Not going to lie, last year I was on the Indiana bandwagon. So it's going to be very difficult to live up to the highs of that. But please, write it in the comments, email us, DM me on Instagram.

Give me a reason to root for your college football team. And I guess I will reveal my choice after the long weekend. I'm going to make you pick, though, today. Because you can't pick after they play. That is cheating. I need people to state their claims first. The only team I've had my eye on so far is the Utah youths for some reason. We're going out west.

And now word from our sponsor, American Express. Neil, where's the most memorable place you've ever. made a business purchase. Business happens everywhere these days, like planes, trains, or even during a friend's really long wedding ceremony. Well, you should know the American Express Business Platinum card can reward your business journey. You can earn 5x membership rewards points on flights and pre-paid hotels booked through amex travel.com and 2x points on eligible purchases in key business categories, as well as on eligible purchases of $5,000 or more terms and cap apply. So you can earn points on your business purchases you're already making and redeem them for wherever your journey

takes you. Learn more at go.m.m.x slash morning brew and find out your welcome offer, which could be as high as 300,000 membership rewards points. That's go.m.x slash morning brew offer and benefit terms apply. Two years ago, Elon Musk unveiled the first ever cyber cab on a Hollywood studio lot. yesterday in Austin, Texas, Musk promised to release a storm of them to the world. The reality was more like a sprinkle than a deluge. The glitzy event to celebrate the official commercial launch of the cybercap was closed to the public.

Attendees mostly consisted of Tesla influencers, and Elon himself couldn't be bothered to show up. But it was the first chapter in one of Elon Musk's oldest dreams, a dream he's bet the company's entire future on. In 2024, Musk promised to go, quote, balls to the wall for autonomy, a move he called blindingly obvious. How to the walls were his balls? Well, the cyber cab is designed to be a two-seat car that has no pedals, no steering wheel,

no side mirrors, and of course, no driver. Elon has promised to mass-produce the car, putting a fleet in every city, and remaking urban transportation as we know it. But so far, its robotaxie service has mainly been operating in Austin since June of last year using modified model-wise. and it's gone well for the most part with only a few minor incidents to speak of. But concerningly, after the hype of last summer, the number of paid miles actually being driven by the network is declining. Which brings us back to yesterday's event.

It was really a handing of the torch from those modified model wise to the cyber cab, which has a more advanced version of Tesla's full self-driving technology, and is designed and built for maximally efficient autonomous operation, according to a musk tweet. Neil, many analysts have pointed to this as a fork in the wrong. road moment for Tesla, where it finally shows it's more than just an EV company and justifies its gaudy valuation, which is more than the next 59 auto makers combined. Was this impressive enough? Well, we'll see. It's got a lot of catching up to do. Currently, Tesla has just over 200 unsupervised robotaxies and a cluster of cities in Texas and Florida. Most of Tesla's

robo-taxying, and I'm putting those in scare quotes, network has a human safety driver in the front seat. Compare that to Waymo, which is the leader in this space, they have more than 4,000 unsupervised robo-taxies, no one in the front seat, no driver in 14 cities. I'm just so fascinated to watch this. It's a real clash of the Titans and two ways of going about autonomy, because from the very beginning, Elon Musk has talked down about LiD, which is what the rest of the industry uses. That's pulsed laser light that measures distances. And you build 3D maps. So Waymo and a bunch of the other companies working on autonomy have used LiDAR. This will be a real test of Tesla's approach.

Elon Musk's approach. He's always done things his own way and says that LiDAR way too expensive. If you've seen a Waymo, it has all these bells and whistles around the cybercars much more sleek because it just used cameras and an AI neural net to get it around. That's one of the big things that we'll be watching to see whether Elon Musk's unorthodox way of approaching autonomy will work out. Not only is it the technology under the hood, just the interior of the cabin looks entirely foreign because Elon Musk describes it as a lounge on wheels. There is no steering wheel. It looks bizarre. You get in and there's just two chairs and a big screen. The fact that he made this bet is the business biggest

risk that Tesla has made because he made the bet before the rules have actually caught up. U.S. auto safety regulators have proposed changing some standards to eliminate regulatory barriers for fully autonomous vehicles, but none of those changes has been finalized yet. You can't really bring a car onto the road that doesn't have any of the things that the entire industry has built the safety standards upon. So that is one big risk. The way they think they'll get around it is another self-driving company, Zooks ultimately received an exemption from federal safety standards that allowed it to deploy its commercial vehicles. Tesla is hoping for something similar, though. It doesn't have that yet. So not only are, is there a differing of approaches when it

comes to the LIDAR, the computer visits of it all, but there's also a differing of approaches when it comes to how the cars themselves were designed. All right, so the Tesla's entire future hangs on this. Elon Musk Fortune hangs on whether they can roll out the cyber car in a mass capacity in the next few years, at least on polymarket, people are not so bullish on this happening imminently. The question, will Tesla sell a cyber cab for $30,000 or less in 2026, is 15.000. percent on polymarket. Currently, cybercabs are not for sale to the public. Moving on, Nvidia isn't content being the lord of the chipmakers. Now it wants dominion over the entire AI kingdom.

To further that quest, the world's most valuable company agreed to pay $12.9 billion to buy Hugging Face, a library of more than 3 million open source AI models. The move, which has been rumored since last week, cements Nvidia's ambition to expand and control the entire AI ecosystem. Hugging Face is more than just an AI library. It's a collaborative hub where engineers and machine learning experts work together on AI models, datasets, and applications. Just 10 years old and based in New York,

hugging face was most recently valued at $4.5 billion in 2023, so it's had a pretty major glow-up in recent years. That's gone with some growing pains, however. If you feel like you've heard the name Hugging Face before, it's because this was the same company that rogue open AI agents broke into in that hack heard around the world earlier than that. this summer. But instead of going into a shell, Hugging Face used the incident as an opportunity to launch a promotional blitz touting open source models, which has been a key point of contention

as Chinese open models become more popular. And it's on this open source question where Hugging Face has found an ally in Invidia, which has also gone to bat for open source AI. Toby, this seems like a match made in Bot Heaven. Hugging Face is a very cool company to me, not just because it has a funny name that's named after the Hugging Face emoji. go back a decade ago, three French entrepreneurs had this idea for an AI companion app. I found their original Product Hunt listing. Product Hunt is this site where you launched your tech projects and they were described as the, oh my gosh, how do you say Tomoguchi? Tomoguchi. Tomoguchi. Tomoguchi. The Tomoguchi powered by artificial intelligence.

One of the founders' descriptions was that it was an artificial intelligence whose goal is not to be useful or accurate, but to be fun and emotional. That was, was the original vision for this? Obviously, that failed to catch on, but while building it, they ended up creating their own natural language processing tools that led them to the much bigger opportunity of making AI technology easier for developers to access and to use. And now it's the hugging face that we know of today. Clearly, one person saw something in them in the early days, though. And that person is Kevin Durant. KD put around $250,000 very early into this company, and that stake has now likely grown to more than $60 million. I found his original tweet after

he invested. This was back on March 9th, 2017. He goes excited for the new release of hashtag hugging face, proud investor, and then put a URL to the site there. So KD has made $500 million on the basketball court, but he made an extra $60 million by investing in this company. A 24,000 percent return. Not bad. Not bad. Let's talk about InVideo why it's doing this. First of all, it's just been on this insane spending spree.

It's spending hundreds of billions of dollars backstopping data centers and all kinds of AI deals because it finds itself at the center of the AI universe. And what it wants to do as in the real universe is make it expand because they know that they are the building blocks of everything that AI runs on, especially. open source AI. So if they can finance more deals and get more AI models out into the world that run on its systems, then they just make more money. And of course, you're thinking 13 point, what is it, $12.9 billion. That's kind of a lot of money. But I mean, InVIDIA makes so much money. They made $60 billion in profits in their recent quarter. They have nearly $200 billion in assets.

So they are clearly on the offensive. A couple years ago, we just knew them as this really fast-growing chipmaker. They made the accelerators that all these models run on. Now they just want to be the sun in the entire AI galaxy. I'm glad that you almost said $13 billion because the acquisition price is very specifically $12,000,930,000, $300,000. That is a specific number. And we know that because one of the co-founders of Hugging Face tweeted out essentially, hey, there's some hidden references in that acquisition price, one relating to us and one relating to Nvidia, is actually pretty easy to find the Easter egg that references Hugging Face because the number 129303 is the

decimal representation of the Unicode point that represents the hugging face emoji. I said that was obvious. It's obvious to the people that operate in these circles. The Nvidia one was a little harder to parse through. Some commenters spotted the 93 combination that's in reference to NVIDIA's founding year, 1993. And then other people went even further. They broke it down into 12, 93, and 03. The 12, he says, referenced NVIDIA's $12 IPO price,

which, by the way, crazy that that's what debuted at. And then 03 pointed to the NVIDIA's three founders, Jensen Huang, amongst other people. So that was the deep dive into this acquisition price. I feel like... It's a little more creative than... just going 69 and 420. I also feel like you feel like acquisition prices should be, you know,

based in facts, based in numbers, revenue, whatnot. Nope, they just wanted Easter eggs that reference their two companies in there. I love nerds. Okay, welcome to Stock of the Week, Dog of the Week, where we pick one stock that sings like Kelly Clarkson and another that just can't hit those golden high notes. I won the pre-show triathlon, so I get to go first. And my stock of the week is all the companies trying to fix that fledgling bald spot

appearing on your skull. Stocks of drug makers attempting to treat baldness have gone nuclear this year as investors set their sights on the second coming of the weight loss revolution just for hair loss. According to Bloomberg, shares of Veridermics, which trades under the ticker M-A-N-E or Maine, have jumped almost 500% since it web public in February. Meanwhile, another company working on this problem, Ab-Sai, has more than doubled. An estimated 50 million men and 30 million women are impacted by pattern hair loss in the U.S. However, no new drugs have been approved in almost three decades. Investors view potential new treatments like the ones being cooked up by these drug makers as a gold mine reminiscent of the boom in GLP1 weight loss drugs, Bloomberg reported,

because right now, if you're going bald, your options are limited. You could go the monocidal road, better known as Rogaine, or fanasteride branded as propitia, but both have considerable side effects. If veridermics or Absi or another major player in the space, Cosmo, can add a compelling new entrant, then we might be looking at the next big blockbuster consumer drug because speaking from experience, this is a massive market. Let's dive into these three companies to watch and their unique approaches to hair loss. Cosmo wants to block the hormone at the follicle level. They are developing, God, this is a tough story for me because there's a lot of really long medical words,

but classical tarone. And they do think that it can treat male patterned baldness. by going after the hormone directly that causes hair loss. Those treatments are still likely a year away from U.S. selves. Then you go to Vera Dermix wants to turn monoxidil into a pill form. They are uniquely going after both male pattern and female pattern hair loss. If they are approved by the FDA, that would be the first pill for female pattern hair loss in the U.S. And then ABSI, they are going crazy. They have an AI designed shot.

So it's actually most akin to the GLP1 shots where it's, say injectable treatment for pattern hair loss. So those are kind of the three biggest names right now, three very different approaches. But again, the pie is so big, the prize is so great that they are going all out for this. And analysts are just so bullish on this because it just affects so many people. I mean, that's 80 million people collectively in the United States.

And the demand is there because according to Gil Blum, who's an analyst at Needham, said people will fly all the way to Turkey to have some hair moved around on their head. Can you imagine if you could do that without getting a hair transplant? The big difference that you need to point out with the obesity situation and the hair loss situation, going bald, not necessarily a health crisis. GLP-1s have been mostly covered by insurance. There is probably no chance that your hair loss treatment will be covered by insurance. So it's going to be an out-of-pocket expense.

Still, analysts think that if these treatments come down the pipe, we haven't had one. like I said, in decades, then people are just going to go crazy for it. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with our Dog A leak right after this. Every year during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, e-commerce stores welcome a wave of first-time buyers. But how do you keep those first-timers coming back all year long? WooCommerce brought together marketing leaders from Clavio, Sephora, and Fanatics to answer that question. In a recent webinar, they discuss how to build loyal customer relationships,

during the upcoming holiday season. They also share why trust matters more than discounts, how first-party data powers meaningful interactions, and more. You can watch the on-demand webinar and download the free modern customer marketing playbook at woocom slash loyalty. That's woocom slash loyalty. When demand slowed for hydrojug,

Amazon ads rising star Hayden Wadsworth pivoted. When our bank account hit near zero, my brother Jake and I had one last shot to save Hydrojug. So we engineered The Traveler, a leakproof, coupled or friendly Tumblr. Amazon ads enables a business to be able to expand their product shelf because of the visibility and the reach you can get. Each week, our new-to-brand customers make up about 95% of all of our sales. Watch Hydrojug's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars. My dog of the week is Burning Man, which is seeing its attendees get older with no Gen Z reinforcements in sight.

The big festival in the Nevada desert where burners gathered who revel in a week-long rave slash art show is seeing its age inch up. There are more burners in their 50s these days than in their 20s, according to a census organized every year by attendees. The event reached peak popularity with the millennial generation in the late 2010s, and it seems like it's still the most popular with the millennial generation as they age into their 40s. Just 10% of those surveyed last year were in their 20s, a steep decline in. compared to the more than 30% back in 2015. Part of the reason it's turned into burning older man is cash. More than a quarter of respondents said that the cost of attendance was their largest obstacle, while 16% said getting time off from work or school was tough as well.

Tickets will now run you $550 plus a $165 vehicle pass, plus factor in gear, food, and water, and Burning Man can feel like lighting money on fire. Neil, just in general, it feels like Burning Man has lost a bit of its luster. Toby, you did a good job, but I think the New York Post might have put it a little more colorfully, which is their headline on this, was Burning Man has become a wrinkled sausage fest of aging millennial men data shows. I want to focus on that data shows thing first because the Burning Man people keep incredible records. Amazing. Right?

Like, the census is so sophisticated. It doesn't just have age and stuff like that, but as income. and religious breakdown and just like very detailed to see who is going to Burning Man. It's pretty fascinating. You talked about the age of people getting older. And with that, people just have more money. One of the things that stood out to me is that Black Rock City, which is this temporary city where Burning Man takes place, is in fact the world's, the country's richest city at this moment in time.

The average personal income of people there is more than $123,000. previous first place, like in the real world, when Burning Man is not happening, the top richest city or metro area is San Jose at a median income of just over $80,000. So right now, Black Rock City, richest city in the country. So it is Burning Man, that's the name, but it's also descriptive of who goes there because men have always historically outnumbered women and the trend is still holding up. Males make up 56% of burners. So the proper name is probably burning rich man, because you are right.

Half of the festival goers make over $100,000 per year. Actually, if you flat that out and adjust it for inflation, it's not as steep of a curve as you would think. It used to be semi-rich people. Now it is very rich people going, but still, in general, this has always been a wealthy collection of people. A lot of attendees, though, say that the younger, generation just isn't cut out for this. Again, reading that New York Post article, they talked to

Adriel Knight. She's 41. She attended back in 2023 when a bunch of rainstorms hit Burning Man, and she recalled one influencer saying, this is not like Coachella at all. And then she went on to say maybe millennials and jet exers have a higher tolerance for discomfort. So there's definitely some generational tension right now going on at Burning Man because maybe they're just not cut out for the rough life out in the Nevada desert. Yeah, and you're not the only one saying maybe Burning Man isn't exactly what it used to be a co-founder of Burning Man back in the early 90s.

John Law published this op-ed in the San Francisco Standard saying that Burning Man was, quote, barely recognizable from what they created a couple decades ago. He said, it is a carnival, a fabulous Disneyland for the well-heeled, all the while presenting itself as a serious artistic enterprise, grounded in philosophical principles. So that is the Burning Man story. It's still going on.

And if you're there, you're probably not listening to this. So I guess you can catch up on all your MBD episodes. I think I'm down to try pretty much everything, but I just don't really have any particular interest. You're not going out for it now. Or I don't have enough money. All right, let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. America's most famous feminist, Gloria Steinem,

died at 92 at her home in New York City on Wednesday. For decades, Steinem was the symbol of the women's movement, pushing for equality as a journalist, activist, organizer, editor, and Aviator Sunglasses Influencer. She was everything everywhere all at once, a co-founder of Miss Magazine, the first magazine to be owned and run entirely by women, a speaker who rallied audiences all over the globe, an author of almost a dozen nonfiction books, and at her core, a listener who empowered others to make themselves heard. In her later years, as digital communications take over, Steinem was a big promoter of gathering in real life. She invited hundreds of people into her home for talking circles, and once told the Associated Press, you can't do it on the phone or on the web. You have to be there with all five senses. It should be obvious that people can't empathize with each other unless we're in the same room. A great quote, and just a very quotable person in general. On her work, she said, people ask me if I'm passing the torch. I always explain that, no, I'm keeping my torch. Thank you very much. And I'm using it to light the torches of other.

I also, a very famous quote that's often attributed to Gloria Steinem is, oh, women need men like fish need a bicycle. She didn't actually say it. It was actually written by the Australian writer, Irina Dunn, and Sinam often had to correct people about that. But it just kind of fit into her ethos a little bit. And then finally, her quote on the success of Miss Magazine, which she launched back in 1972.

It's a result of letting women tell the truth to each other and not pretending that we're all white, skinny, beautiful, and that we're only interested in 101 different ways to cook a hamburger, being superwoman or whatever. So kind of sums her up as a person, but yes, an inspiring life. Her final memoir and unexpected life is due out later this month. Moving on, if your co-workers' output suspiciously went to zero yesterday morning,

it's because three major AI models and Grok all suffered overlapping outages. Down Detector showed Open AI. Anthropic, Google, and XAI all had spiking problems around 10 to 1130 a.m. The weird thing was that the companies that run the plumbing of the internet, like Amazon Web Services, Azure, or Cloudflare, show no issues on their end. And while AI models go down occasionally, it's gotten pretty rare these days. According to ARST Technica, Claude reports 99.4% uptime over the last 90 days, while OpenAI reports 99.63% uptime for chat GPT. to see them all go down at the same time for unexplained reasons. It feels like some shared third-party provider had to be involved,

and yet no company cited an external source, Neil. You know, Toby, so you were slacking and emailing up a storm in the morning, and then all of a sudden around 10 o'clock hits, and then you go kind of silent. I don't hear from you. You're still there in the office. I'm just wondering what happened to your productivity. Did something happen?

It's better than people who said, like, Suddenly my girlfriend or boyfriend who I've never met stopped texting me, that would be a worse outcome if LMs go down and suddenly your girlfriend goes silent. But yes, a bit bizarre that we don't really know exactly what happened here because it appeared to be simultaneous. The Rock XAI said there was an outage at their Memphis Compute Center. Anthropics said it was an infrastructure issue, open AI, a routing issue, but usually you can identify a source when all these AI things go down

or just any tech platform in general. But yeah, Toby, not doing a lot of work yesterday. I wonder why. Okay, you can just start a Mac and Cheese brand during the pandemic and sell it to the largest pasta company in the world. Goodles did it. The upstart Mac and Cheesemaker agreed to be acquired by Barilla,

the Italian pasta giant, for an undisclosed amount. Back in a 2023 funding round, Goodles was valued at $88 million. It's been a stunning rise. First introduced in 2021, Goodles offered a healthy-free mac and cheese with protein and fiber, then branched out into other pasta noodles. And people goodled it up.

The brand's share of U.S. spending of shelf-stable mac and cheese went from 0.8% three years ago to 7.8% this June. Toby, do you goodle? What do you think about their tagline when they launched noodles gooder? That's Goodles right there. So that one might make you roll your eyes, but I have sampled their wares. I'm a bit of a box mac and cheese, shelf stable mac and cheese connoisseur. And I would put them below craft still, but above Velvita.

I don't know if people are going to argue or agree with me on that. But kind of their thing is that they have more upscale flavors. It's not just mac and cheese. They also have fruffle infused. They have a lot of different kind of noodle shapes and flavor profile. So yeah, it's kind of one of those things if you feel like treating yourself when it comes a box mac and cheese that's where gudels comes in and clearly it's doing well because it's taking market share from the big boys isn't that the dream though you're just like oh yeah make mac and

cheese and then sell it to barilla for probably over a hundred million dollars i mean that is really what that's why we're all here they they called the protein wave that was like the smart part is that they were even before it's become just the the biggest nutrition trend of the you know the last couple of years 2021 was early to that wave a little bit and they clearly um pick the right one to ride i love mac and cheese okay that is all the time we have thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful long weekend to share your thoughts on the episode or anything else send an email to morning brew daily at morning brew.com or dm us on instagram at mbby daily show let's roll the credits emily miliron is our supervising producer raymond lu is our senior producer

our producer is olivia graham and our associate producer is olivia lake technical direction by nina miller hair and makeup apparently thought it was a four-day weekend devon emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show, Daniel. I wish you all well. The following is a paid advertisement. Toby, do you have a personal philosophy? Yes, everyone should have more money. New York Life's protection-powered growth philosophy might align with yours then.

It explores how protection can serve as a strategic foundation for long-term financial success that enables future opportunities. Their approach brings protection and growth together, helping clients build confidence through every stage of life. learn more head to new york life.com slash protection dash powered dash growth that's new yorklife dot com slash protection dash powered dash growth