Scamfluencers - Listen Now: Business Wars | The Race to Ozempic

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

Business is war. Sometimes the prize is your wallet or your attention. Sometimes, it’s just the fun of beating the other guy. The outcome of these battles shapes what we buy and how we live. Business Wars gives you the unauthorized, real story of what drives these companies and their leaders, innovators, investors and executives to new heights -- or to ruin. In the newest season of Business Wars, dive into the high-stakes race to supply the world’s hottest weight-loss drug. Listen to Business Wars: The Race to Ozempic: https://wondery.fm/BW_IFDSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The miracle weight loss drug, Ozempic, took America by storm, with celebrities and influencers singing its praises. But as demand explodes, supply just can't keep up. Now desperate consumers are turning to dangerous alternatives, unregulated knockoffs from online pharmacies, with no guarantee of what's actually inside those vials. I'm David Brown, host of business wars. In our latest season, we're pulling back the curtain on the high-stakes battle between pharmaceutical giants Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. It's a race against time as they fight to meet surging demand while mysterious counterfeits flood the market. Can they close the supply gap before one bad vial destroys everything? You're about to hear a clip from business wars. Make sure to follow

Business Wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast. It's August 2025. An SUV full of FDA agents pulls into a shipping yard in Cincinnati, Ohio. Behind them, U.S. Customs and Border Protectionations roll in, engines rumbling. The agents pile out of their vehicles and walk across the yard, which is crammed with thousands of shipping containers. Soon, the crates will be loaded onto semi-trucks and shipped all over the country. The agents make their way to the manager's office, a dusty white trailer, at the center of the lot.

The door opens, and a confused-looking man steps out. An agent hands him a warrant, and then, the raid begins. Agents fan out, throwing open shipping containers, ripping open boxes. Finally, an agent steps into a container that recently arrived from Hong Kong. He pulls out a razor blade, slices open one of the cardboard boxes, and freezes. He yells for the other agents to come over. He's found what they're looking for. The agents swarm in and start ripping into the boxes.

Inside each one are rows and rows of small glass vials labeled semaglutide. That's the active ingredient in Ozempic, the diabetes medication that millions of people use to lose weight. Except these vials aren't filled with Ozempic. They may not even contain semi-glutide. There's no way of knowing what's in them, but that hasn't stopped shady, online pharmacies from selling the liquid cheaply to unsuspecting customers. The agents load up close to 17,000 vials of unregulated weight loss medication, worth millions on the black market. The FDA agents know this drug bust is just a drop in the bucket.

Across the United States, truckloads of unregulated illegal doses of fake OZempic are being transported and sold to people desperate to lose weight. But they don't always work. They're dangerous, and they are absolutely everywhere. The FDA wants to remove these knock-offs from the market. And so does Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical giant that developed Ozympic. Because these counterfeits don't just threaten public safety. They're undermining years of careful research and development that went into creating a legitimate medical treatment. Novo Nordisk wants to preserve the integrity of their breakthrough medication,

and the profits that come with it. As fake versions of OZempic continue to spread and competitors like Eli Lilly Circle, Novo Nordisk is fighting a war on two fronts. And in this $28 billion battle, there's no guarantee that even the original innovator will emerge on top. You can binge every season of business wars early in ad-free,

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