The Hollow Men of Hims

Summary

There are two examples of American justice that never fail to warm my heart. The first is how O.J. Simpson walked free after a little light murder. The second is how Hims & Hers will undoubtedly walk free after theirs—though in fairness to the Juice, at least he didn't claim to be democratizing justice while brandishing the knife.There was a time, not so long ago, when a man who could not perform sexually might visit his doctor in shame, when a woman losing her hair might accept it as the cruel arithmetic of genetics, when the overweight resigned themselves to the pedestrian tyranny of diet and exercise. These conditions deserve treatment—real treatment, from qualified providers who understand both the science and the human cost of sexual dysfunction, hair loss, and obesity. But then—and you can almost hear the angels singing here—Hims & Hers Health discovered that desperation, properly monetized, could become a billion-dollar enterprise wrapped in the gauzy rhetoric of disruption and accessibility. They were part of a sprawling ecosystem of barely regulated companies that had learned to transform the FDA's good faith into their own profit centers, while maintaining the sort of pious expression one might expect from a Victorian missionary bringing enlightenment to the benighted masses—which, come to think of it, is probably exactly how they see themselves.We threw in Elizabeth Holmes for a lot less—though one suspects her fatal error was not the fraud itself but the transparency of it, the sheer crudeness of promising blood tests that did not work rather than the more sophisticated approach of selling actual drugs through loopholes so baroque that even their exploitation carries a patina of legitimacy.The company's Super Bowl commercial in early 2025—titled "Sick of the System"—told us everything we needed to know about the particular pathology it represents. There, between the beer ads and the crypto pitches, Hims positioned itself as David against Big Pharma's Gol...