It’s no secret that I despise the The New York Times—a century-plus testament to self-righteousness, self-congratulation, and a willingness to stretch the facts to fit the narrative that would make Procrustes proud—but I have to admit that it generally does a reasonably professional job with the basics. And while the paper has a well-deserved reputation for appropriating the work of other journalists—swooping in on stories that smaller publications had uncovered and pretending it was the one who discovered them—it does at least usually give a thorough read to what it’s about to “borrow.”This time… not so much.(Disclaimer: Other than the following excerpt, which was in front of the paywall, I’m basing my comments on extensive quotes and summaries from multiple trusted sources. As far as I can tell, there’s a broad consensus about this article.)How A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8 Billion CompanyErin GriffithMatthew Gallagher took just two months, $20,000 and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his start-up off the ground.From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used A.I. to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created A.I. systems to analyze his business’s performance. And he outsourced the other stuff he couldn’t do himself.His start-up, Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained 1,000 more. In 2025, Medvi’s first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales.Mr. Gallagher then hired his only employee, his younger brother, Elliot. This year, they are on track to do $1.8 billion in sales.A $1.8 billion company with just two employees? In the age of A.I., it’s increasingly possible.Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, predicted the rise of a new breed of superefficient company in 2024. A one-person business worth $1 billion “would have been unimaginable without A.I.,” he said on a podcast, “and now it will happen.”Now as A.I. tools spread, entrepreneurs are harnessing the technology to expand their start-ups to an enormous scale at breathtaking speed with very few humans. Big companies, especially in tech, are getting in on the disruption, too. Pinterest, Block and others have cut thousands of workers in recent months, citing efficiencies enabled by A.I.Even in these few paragraphs, there are a number of red flags. Fortunately, they are covered in detail—not in the Times piece, of course, but in some strong reporting from Maggie Harrison Dupré in this Futurism article from nearly a year ago. MEDVi’s site represents layers of sophisticated trickery that, while previously much more difficult, have been made incredibly accessible through easy-to-use text and image generators and deepfake tools. As profiteers race to flood the web with disorienting AI-powered content, including around buzzy products like GLP-1 meds, the eternal advice to not believe everything you read — and now, everything you see — online is now more urgent than ever. We first came across MEDVi in a deeply mangled digital advertisement found at the foot of a local news article showcasing a clearly AI-generated image of a box of Ozempic. To say nothing of the fact that the image used looks absolutely nothing like a real box of Ozempic, the AI-drawn box is covered with AI artifacts like twisted, gibberish letters, and includes a legume-like logo bearing no resemblance to the real logo used by Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk, which features an Apis bull. “Solution fo [sic] injection,” reads one prominent piece of text on the ersatz box, while another claims that the package contains a “solutån [sic] for injection in pre-filled pen.” “O)zenpic,” reads a garbled and incorrectly-spelled Ozempic logo on the side of the box.It gets worse. Just underneath these images, MEDVi includes a rotating list of logos belonging to websites and news publishers, ranging from health hubs like Healthline to reputable publications like The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Forbes, among others — suggesting that MEDVi is reputable enough to have been covered by mainstream publications. Forbes, we found, did include MEDVi in a roundup of “Best Weight Loss Injections Of 2025,” where it earned a “very good” rating of “9.4.” The article appeared in Forbes Health, and includes a disclaimer noting that the page’s content was “created independently from the Forbes Health Editorial team.” But otherwise, there was no sign of MEDVi coverage in the New York Times, Bloomberg, or the other outlets it mentioned. The only other remotely mainstream news coverage we could find of the company was in an US Weekly article from earlier this month, titled “6 Affordable GLP-1 Solutions After the FDA Bans Generic Medications” that also circulated on Yahoo. (Both the Forbes Health and US Weekly articles were affiliate content, meaning they were created outside of normal editorial channels, and the outlets earn money when readers click the links on the page.) And worse: Contrasted with the stock photo-esque images featured elsewhere on the page, these images looked much less uncanny. Their bodies had more distinct, lifelike details, and objects and lettering seen in the background looked genuine. And when we dug through web searches to see if the images existed elsewhere, we realized that’s because the photos of dramatic weight loss were indeed real. At least, from the neck down. What appears to have happened is that the sloperators behind MEDVi took images that had already been floating around the web for years, and used AI-powered deepfake tech to convincingly alter their faces. Take the side-by-side images of “Michael P,” who MEDVi claims lost 48 pounds over just five months. We were able to find the original image in a Daily Mail article from 2018 — before semaglutide was even approved for weight loss purposes — that featured before-and-after photos of people who quit drinking, which was itself based on an undated Bored Panda article of “Before & After Pics That Show What Happens When You Stop Drinking.” And worse still: We contacted each doctor to ask if they could confirm their involvement with MEDVi and NuHuman. We heard back from one of those medical professionals at the time of publishing, an osteopathic medicine practitioner named Tzvi Doron, who insisted that he had nothing to do with either company and “[needs] to have them remove me from their sites.” We also reached out to MEDVi, which didn’t respond. When we tried to reach out to NuHuman with the site’s listed email, the message bounced back. We did find some Reddit comments, though, warning other netizens to steer clear of MEDVi, claiming serious allegations of possible HIPPA violations, shady billing practices, and even damaged vials of seemingly bogus drugs causing physical harm. Harrison Dupré's follow-up to the NYT piece was even more damning.After another 18 paragraphs, the NYT wrote that Gallagher, after hiring his younger brother in April 2025, finally had the bandwidth to “fix some shortcuts he had initially taken, like swapping out the before-and-after weight-loss photos for ones from real customers.” “Shortcut” is a telling word. Ctrl-f is a shortcut. Store-bought granola is a shortcut. Hawking drugs online by claiming nonexistent affiliations with doctors and manipulating photos of strangers might indeed be a way to make a lot of money quickly — but whether you see it as a shortcut or fraud is probably a litmus test for your sense of business ethics. And whatever the NYT might claim, it doesn’t seem like Medvi ever really stopped cutting corners....The NYT also neglected to mention that Medvi received a strongly-worded warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just two months ago, in February 2026. The warning came amid a broader crackdown on the controversial telehealth world, as Stat News reported last month, which also feels like important context about Medvi’s skyrocketing success in an explosive market that regulators are attempting to rein in. In the letter, the FDA took issue with numerous Medvi tactics. One compliance failure it noted was the company’s practice of using images of GLP-1 vials and pill bottles with the name “MEDVI” splashed across them, which the regulator argued was misleading to consumers, as it suggested that Medvi was the compounder of the drugs it sells “when in fact it is not.” (Medvi.org has since removed Medvi’s name from these fake vials.)The FDA also admonished Medvi’s marketing language around some of the murkier pharmaceutical products that Medvi has offered. The letter warned that Medvi’s site had positioned unapproved compounds as “FDA-approved or otherwise evaluated for safety and effectiveness when they have not.” (The letter specifically called attention to claims made on the domain Medvi.io, which is now shut down, though the letter was addressed to Medvi LLC; it’s unclear how much the FDA knows about Medvi’s tangled web of domains.) “Failure to adequately address any violations may result in legal action without further notice, including, without limitation, seizure and injunction,” the FDA warned Medvi in the letter. Medvi has also been ensnared in multiple lawsuits and legal actions, including a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) case that accuses its partner OpenLoop, a telehealth company, and a compounding pharmacy of selling a compounded weight loss pill with “no demonstrated mechanism of absorption or efficacy.” Medvi isn’t named as a defendant, but the plaintiff in the case claims to have purchased the drugs via Medvi’s platform. Dr. Jonathan Slotkin, a neurosurgeon, hospital executive, and investor called the NYT‘s profile of Medvi a “transcript of a Silicon Valley fever dream” and a “byproduct of regulatory lag and consumer desperation.”...Others, though, were quick to raise concerns about Medvi’s ongoing ethical issues. Many cited Futurism’s previous reporting, while others pointed out that, as of the NYT piece’s publication, Meta platforms were crawling with paid Medvi ads promoted by accounts belonging to clearly fake doctors. One alleged doctor being used to promote Medvi’s erectile dysfunction drugs — another burgeoning area of its telehealth business — had the head-scratching name of “Dr. Tuckr Carlzyn MD,” which doesn’t seem to be associated with any real physician. Indeed, a review by the pharmaceuticals-focused outlet Drug Discovery & Development found the widespread use of fake doctors to promote Medvi drugs, including both semaglutide and erectile dysfunction meds. As Findeisen noted in his video, some of these advertisements also appear to include AI-faked before-and-after weight loss videos. Mike Masnick also eviscerated the NYTThat said, you can feel the pull of the narrative that seduced the NYT: a scrappy founder with a rags-to-riches backstory, two brothers taking on the world, AI tools stitching it all together, Sam Altman himself anointing the achievement as proof that his prediction of a “one man, one billion dollar company, thanks to AI” was correct. It’s a hell of a story. The problem is that almost none of it holds up to even the most basic scrutiny, and the fact that the New York Times — the New York Times — fell for it (or worse, didn’t care) is an embarrassment. As much as I’ve made fun of the NYT for its bad reporting over the years, this is (by far) the worst I’ve seen. They didn’t just misunderstand something, or try to push a misleading narrative, they got fully played on a bullshit story that any competent reporter or editor should have realized from the jump. This one stinks from top to bottom. As did Gary Marcus. A friend of mine who has been tracking this for a while had sees Medvi as “a fraud-layer on top of also-scammy-but-possibly-less-illegal platforms”, speculating that “If there is any money there, they will be sued by all their suppliers and vendors, because I’m sure they’re in violation of every agreement in terms of compliance efforts, safe data handling, etc.” (The friend also is doubtful of the revenue reports, asking “why would this be the only thing they’re telling the truth about?”) Financial journalist Voidzilla (a.k..a Stephen Findeisen) has a first-rate video take-down.
