TheChek News Flow

The 25,000-square-foot, Grade II-listed property was once the home of society hostess Margaret Greville.

NEW CLUB: French hospitality company Loulou Groupe, the operator of Loulou Paris, Le Flandrin and Le Grand Café, is opening its first U.K. branch next fall in the form of a private members’ club nestled within a Mayfair town house, called 16 Charles Street.

The 25,000-square-foot, Grade II listed property was once the home of society hostess Margaret Greville, and is now being reimagined to become a social and dining club for Loulou Groupe’s Les Amis members.

The club — informed by the spirited travels of Loulou de la Falaise, whose colorful life inspired the name of the group, and Greville — will have five floors of salons, bar spaces and restaurants spearheaded by chef Benoît Dargère. On the ground floor, there will be an open-to-the-public French brasserie, offering a first glimpse into the world above.

Claire Malafosse, cofounder and artistic director of the Loulou Groupe, said London has a special energy: the creativity, the global reach, the warmth and many of the group’s guests were already calling it their second home.

“When we walked into 16 Charles Street, everything aligned at once. We hadn’t planned to expand everywhere; that’s not who we are. But sometimes life presents the perfect building, the perfect moment, and you simply say, ‘Voilà, this is it.’ A beautiful stroke of luck, and the most natural next home for us, our pied-à-terre in London,” Malafosse added.

Companies are rolling out direct-to-patient services, which are selling drugs for weight loss and other uses

Drugmakers are moving to sell their medicines directly to patients, abandoning the middlemen they have long relied on.

The shift is a huge departure from how pharmaceutical companies including Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Pfizer have sold drugs for decades and threatens the multibillion-dollar business of firms that have traditionally filled prescriptions.

It is saving some patients hundreds of dollars off the cost of prescriptions because companies have been lowering the prices for drugs sold directly.

Meantime, drugmakers who have been rolling out the services in recent months see a big opportunity to boost sales, though they risk losing revenue if they don’t offset lower prices by selling to more patients.

“For the first time, pharma is actually looking end-to-end at the full patient journey,” said Pratap Khedkar, chief executive of pharmaceutical consulting firm ZS. “That is a very different mindset than has been the case for the last 50 years.”

Blister packs of Eliquis tablets from Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Drugmakers selling directly to patients threatens the traditional multibillion-dollar business of filling prescriptions. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News

The trend is most pronounced in the booming weight-loss drug market. Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are seeing big growth in sales of their popular drugs through direct-order services the companies have started since last year.

Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca, in addition to Pfizer, have launched the services for treatments for diabetes, psoriasis and cardiovascular disease, including the widely used blood thinner Eliquis sold by Pfizer and Bristol-Myers.

The growth of the services, which are offered through websites, reflects just how comfortable consumers have become with getting healthcare digitally. Now, many patients talk with doctors and order drugs online.

“This is how people are experiencing healthcare,” said David Moore, executive vice president of Novo Nordisk’s U.S. operations.

Drugmakers generally offer direct-to-patient services through company-operated websites. Since patients will need a prescription, some sites help patients find a doctor for either an in-person or telehealth visit.

Patients buy their medicines through the sites at discounted prices—often half the list price—and often without using insurance. The services usually arrange for home delivery, or for patients to pick up prescriptions at a pharmacy.

Craig Voorman started ordering discounted vials of Lilly’s weight-loss drug Zepbound through LillyDirect last year so he could save hundreds of dollars a month.

Voorman, a 71-year-old retired pharmaceutical sales manager living in Fort Myers, Fla., gets his health insurance through a Medicare plan that doesn’t cover the drug, which meant he used to pay the full cost.

It was $1,050 at Costco when I started, and the vials were not available,” he said. “As soon as it was offered at $550 in the vial, I switched.” He used the savings, he said, to help his daughter-in-law pay for her prescription for the drug.

About 30% of the roughly 500,000 weekly prescriptions for Zepbound in the U.S. are now sold through Lilly’s online service at discounted cash prices—as low as $299 a month, versus a list price of $1,086.

The direct-to-patient service is helping fuel what is expected to be nearly $13 billion in total Zepbound sales for 2025.

Direct-to-patient is “creating an experience for consumers that you would expect outside of healthcare,” Jennifer Mazur, senior vice president of Lilly USA’s consumer-services division and general manager of LillyDirect.

For decades, the pharmaceutical industry has sold drugs to wholesalers and pharmacies, which then provide the drugs to patients and get reimbursed for the bulk of the cost by patients’ health-insurance plans.

Drugmakers also have been exploring working more directly with self-insured employers to provide coverage and access to certain drugs.

The services could get a boost in traffic in early 2026 if the Trump administration goes ahead with plans to launch TrumpRx, a drug-buying website that will connect patients with discounted prices.

The efforts cut out middlemen called pharmacy-benefit managers, or PBMs, who usually play a key role in getting prescriptions filled and reimbursed.

PBMs often negotiate how much health plans will pay for a prescription and recommend which drugs patients can get and how much their copay or other out-of-pocket charge will be.

The firms make money from client fees and a cut of rebates paid by drug manufacturers.

“For most patients, drugs will cost even less out of pocket and face fewer safety concerns when their medications are delivered through their prescription drug benefits at their pharmacies and with their doctors involved,” said a spokesman for Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, a PBM trade group.

Direct-to-patient likely won’t be a sales channel for complex and pricey biotech drugs, particularly those dosed in healthcare facilities, according to industry officials and analysts.

Nor might it drive much sales for drugs that have broad insurance coverage with affordable copays for patients.

The dynamics of the weight-loss drug market, however, make it well-suited for a direct-purchase model because insurance coverage of weight-loss drugs is low, leaving more people exposed to the full price of the drugs.

Also, social media is fueling consumer demand for the drugs to a much greater degree than most other drug categories.

About 10% of Novo Nordisk’s U.S. prescription volume for Wegovy, Executive Vice President Moore said, comes from direct cash purchases. Analysts expect Wegovy to generate $11.9 billion in global sales this year, up more than 40% from last year, according to FactSet.

Today was the last race of the 2025 F1 championship, and that also meant the last time ESPN will broadcast a race in the United States. From next year, Apple takes over with all races streaming as part of an Apple TV subscription.

Apple released a new social media ad for the deal today, giving us our first look at how the F1 channel will look inside of the TV app.

As a reminder, Apple announced a five year partnership as the exclusive broadcast partner for F1 in the US, beginning with the 2026 season.

The first race weekend commences on March 6-8, but the service will likely go live in the TV app sooner than that, including some preseason content. All of the Formula 1 content will be available at no extra charge with an Apple TV subscription.

Apple previously said the TV app will incorporate streaming of all practice, qualifying, sprint, and Grand Prix sessions across the season.

From the newly-released screenshots, we can also see that the platform will include streaming onboard driver cams with support for Multiview to show several perspectives at once during a race. (Assuming device compatibility remains the same, Multiview is supported on Apple TV set-top boxes, iPad and Apple Vision Pro.)

Driver onboard cams is one of the features that F1 fans in the US used to need to subscribe to F1.TV to access. Apple has teased that more announcements about “production details” and “product enhancements” will be revealed in the coming months, so you can expect the TV app to add some extra bells and whistles over time.

However, if you are a hardcore fan, you are not limited by the feature set of what Apple makes available directly inside the TV app itself. You will be able to use your Apple TV account to sign into the F1.TV website or the F1.TV apps, and continue to access the sport in the same way as F1.TV subscribers have done so before.

But rather than paying a dedicated subscription just for F1.TV, it is now simply a ‘free’ perk of an Apple TV subscription.

Right now, Apple TV costs $12.99 per month or $99 annually. You can also subscribe to the Apple One bundle and get access to Apple TV at a discounted rate, along with iCloud storage and other Apple content services.

Google’s ‘TPU’ chip puts OpenAI on alert and shakes Nvidia investors

AI advances made through group’s custom processor hits Nvidia’s stock and prompts ChatGPT maker to declare ‘code red’

Google’s secret weapon in the artificial intelligence race is a chip that has helped the search group’s models leap ahead of OpenAI, prompting tech investors to reassess a new threat to Nvidia’s dominance. 

The Big Tech group’s “tensor processing unit” has been central to efforts to boost the performance of Google’s new Gemini 3 AI models, which have outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5 in independent benchmarking tests.

That development is one factor behind the ChatGPT maker’s “code red” last week, as chief executive Sam Altman told staff to refocus resources into improving its chatbot and models.

Google plans to more than double production of its TPUs by 2028, analysts predict, as it steps up its ambitions for a processor that chip consultancy SemiAnalysis says is now “neck and neck with king of the jungle Nvidia” for building and running cutting-edge AI systems. 

Nvidia investors have also been rattled by the prospect of Google offering TPUs to customers beyond its own cloud computing platform. This includes a recent deal to provide AI start-up Anthropic with 1mn TPUs, worth tens of billions of dollars.

Google argues vertical integration — developing AI hardware, software and chips largely in-house — will deliver both technical advantages and huge profits.

Gemini 3, like Google’s previous models, was trained largely on TPUs. OpenAI relies mainly on Nvidia graphics processing units to build the large language models that power ChatGPT. 

“The most important thing is . . . that full stack approach,” said Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s AI architect and DeepMind’s chief technology officer, “I think we have a unique approach there.”

Combining that with understanding how billions of consumers use Gemini, AI overviews in search and other products gives Google a huge advantage, he added. 

Morgan Stanley estimates that every 500,000 TPUs sold to external customers could generate as much as $13bn in revenue for Google. The Big Tech company works primarily with chip design partner Broadcom, as well as with MediaTek, to develop the processors. 

Morgan Stanley analysts also predict that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company will produce 3.2mn TPUs next year, growing to 5mn in 2027 and 7mn in 2028.

“Growth in 2027 is significantly stronger than previously anticipated,” the bank’s analysts said in a recent research note.

Nvidia’s stock fell sharply last month following a report in The Information that Meta was in talks with Google to buy TPUs. Meta has declined to comment on the report. 

Some analysts believe Google could also strike such deals with OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI or start-ups such as Safe Superintelligence, potentially driving upwards of $100bn in new Google revenues over the coming years. 

Experts add that AI-enabled coding tools could make it easier for potential TPU customers to rewrite their software, which until now has largely been built on top of Nvidia’s proprietary Cuda platform.

Nvidia has sought to assuage market concerns, saying it was still “a generation ahead of the industry” and was “the only platform that runs every AI model”, adding: “We continue to supply to Google.”

The chipmaker added it offers “greater performance, versatility, and fungibility” than processors such as TPUs, “which are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions”.

The origins of Google’s TPU date back to an internal presentation in 2013 by Jeff Dean, Google’s long-serving chief scientist, following a breakthrough in using deep neural networks to improve its speech recognition systems. 

“The first slide was: Good news! Machine learning finally works,” said Jonathan Ross, a Google hardware engineer at the time. “Slide number two said: “Bad news, we can’t afford it.”

Dean calculated that if Google’s hundreds of millions of consumers used voice search for just three minutes a day, the company would have to double its data-centre footprint just to serve that function — at a cost of tens of billions of dollars. 

Ross, who now leads AI chip start-up Groq, said he started working on TPUs in 2013 as a side project as he happened to be sitting next to a team working on Google’s speech recognition technology.

“We built that first chip I think with 15 people,” Ross told a podcast interviewer in December 2023. 

The project has scaled rapidly. One early application was 2016’s famous victory by Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo programme against the world champion of the board game Go, Lee Sedol. The match is considered a significant AI milestone.

The chips have for several years powered many of Google’s core services, including search, advertising and YouTube. 

Google typically releases a new generation of TPU every two years, though that cadence has shifted to annual updates since 2023. 

“Google Cloud is experiencing accelerating demand for both our custom TPUs and Nvidia GPUs,” said a Google spokesperson. “We are committed to supporting both, as we have for years.”

Jay-Z’s investment firm targets $500mn Korean pop culture-focused fund

MarcyPen Capital Partners bets on K-pop’s global popularity as it agrees partnership with Hanwha Asset Management

Jay-Z’s investment firm is targeting a $500mn fund to back South Korean lifestyle companies as US private equity bets on the global popularity of Korean pop culture.

MarcyPen Capital Partners, which is backed by the rapper, is working with Hanwha Asset Management, the financial arm of one of South Korea’s biggest conglomerates, to raise a private equity fund that will focus on entertainment, beauty, food and lifestyle companies pursuing international growth.

The companies on Tuesday said they had signed an agreement to launch a series of Asian investment funds at the Abu Dhabi Finance Week event.

Korean pop culture has exploded in popularity in recent years, with music groups such as Blackpink and BTS filling arenas around the world and productions such as Squid Game and KPop Demon Hunters dominating streaming platforms.

“There is an opportunity for the global expansion of Korean companies,” said Jong-Ho James Kim, chief executive of Hanwha Asset Management. “Usually Korean companies use their own capital or corporate funds, but if there is third-party assistance, then our growth potential will be greater.”

South Korea’s government has invested billions of dollars into the cultural sector as part of its hallyu, or “Korean wave”, policy to boost the country’s economy and soft power through cultural exports.

The “Korean wave” — which includes industries such as entertainment, beauty, food and fashion — generated more than $31bn globally last year, said Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a Korean music export agency. “[It] is now the second-largest consumer goods export out of South Korea” after cars, Cho said.

Kim said private equity had not previously funded Korean culture, entertainment and sports ventures aiming for global expansion. 

Hanwha will source the companies, Kim said, while MarcyPen has “a good track record in operating funds for lifestyle, fashion and food” and the ability to identify high-potential targets.

Hanwha Asset Management is part of Hanwha Group, which also owns South Korea’s largest defence contractor. The money manager has more than Won122tn ($83bn) in assets under management.

MarcyPen was formed in 2024 by the merger of Marcy Capital Partners, which was co-founded by Jay-Z, and the investment arm of Pendulum Holdings.

The company “provides strategic capital to growth-stage consumer businesses that create, move and lead culture”, according to its website. It manages $1.1bn in assets. Past investments include minimalist cosmetics maker Merit Beauty and Rael, an organic feminine care brand.

“South Korea is a cultural nexus of Asia, influencing global trends in beauty, content, food, entertainment and lifestyle, making it the ideal gateway for our partnership with Hanwha,” Robbie Robinson, managing partner and chief executive of MarcyPen, said in a statement.

The fund aims to begin raising money in the second half of next year from institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds and wealthy individuals.

Conducting his last opening night as music director, Riccardo Chailly gave listeners a performance to remember

As a centrepiece of the ongoing Shostakovich anniversary, the choice of opera was as audacious as it was obvious. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk — the Russian composer’s towering 1934 work with graphic adultery, multiple murders and an orchestral score that leaves little to the imagination — fell foul of the Soviet censors and was dismissed as “pornography”. Yet here it was on the opening night of La Scala’s season, a high-stakes highlight of the Italian cultural calendar attended by the political elite and beamed to millions of television viewers nationwide.

The subject matter is hardly light entertainment. Katerina, a lonely merchant’s wife in rural 19th-century Russia, makes off with the newly employed workman, Sergei, before poisoning her father-in-law, Boris, and strangling her husband, Zinovy, whose corpse she hides in the cellar. Days after Stalin stormed out of a 1936 performance, Pravda denounced the work as “muddle instead of music”. Now, 50 years since Shostakovich’s death, one might have imagined similarly scandalised audience members — at an event often more memorable for offstage pageantry (police in plumed hats, paparazzi crushes and celebrities brandishing tickets worth €3,200) than the opera production itself.

Not this year. Director Vasily Barkhatov, the Russian director making his house debut, updates the action to a restaurant during the dying days of Stalinism, dividing the action between a monumental dining hall and a seedy back of house with an upper kitchen and a cellar below. By way of an effective flashback device, suspects and witnesses relive unspeakable crimes during police interrogations, giving events a grim inevitability. While families watching on TV are spared onstage sex, the fully clothed Katerina and Sergei re-enact the scene as officers take photos and Shostakovich’s score pants and grunts. The result is doubly disturbing.

Barkhatov showcases mastery of detail, weaving black humour — restaurant staff bungling a dead body through a jammed door, or blithely sweeping a floor as their poisoned employer writhes — with imagery so sleazy you are left wanting a shower. A gang of chefs overpower the workwoman Aksinya in the kitchen while a priest downs vodka in the cellar. When a creeping Zinovy secretly catches Katerina and Sergei in the act, the subsequent intermezzo preceding their apparent discovery sounds especially sinister.

Conducting his last opening night as music director after nearly a decade in the role, Riccardo Chailly gave listeners a performance to remember. He sands down Shostakovich’s rough edges — La Scala’s luminous strings at times have a Mahlerian quality — while suffusing gorgeously sculpted interludes with aching despair and black doom. At times, playing was astonishingly intense. Lined up on the restaurant’s mezzanine to salute Boris’s coffin below, brass players unleashed a wave of visceral rage that stays with you long after the performance. The excellent chorus gave similarly powerful deliveries. 

With his inky voice and domineering presence, Alexander Roslavets’s ferocious Boris conjured much of the performance’s brutality. Yevgeny Akimov’s fluttering tenor made for a comically dithering Zinovy. Najmiddin Mavlyanov’s strapping Sergei was equally believable as seducer and swindler. As Katerina, Sara Jakubiak had little trouble standing out from the coterie of despicable males, keeping listeners gripped right until her shocking final self-immolation in place of the libretto’s river drowning. 

Evolution Capital Management must pay Robert Gagliardi $5.4mn plus interest after High Court judgment

A hedge fund that was sued by a trader for refusing to pay a performance-related bonus, despite him making 97 per cent of its revenue, has been ordered to pay him $5.4mn plus interest by the High Court in London.

Robert Gagliardi sued his former employer, Evolution Capital Management, in London, alleging that it acted in bad faith by denying him a $7.5mn discretionary bonus after he had generated more than $60mn for the firm between April 2021 and March 2022.

The bonus will bring Gagliardi’s total pay for his brief stint at the fund to more than $12mn. He was already paid $7mn by Evolution, including a $625,000 signing bonus, a base salary of about $425,000 and a $6mn “new issue bonus” for successfully trading initial public offerings.

Gagliardi, a block trading specialist nicknamed “Gags”, alleged that he was told in early 2021 that a return of $10mn over the rest of the year would be an “excellent result”. When Gagliardi asked the fund’s founder Michael Lerch for the payout in 2022, he responded: “I’m not going to pay you the bonus, fnck you, sue me.”

Although Evolution did not dispute his extraordinary returns, the fund argued that the damage done to its reputation as a result of dealing with a US Securities and Exchange Commission probe into some of Gagliardi’s trades at his previous employer outweighed his performance, and that the bonus did not need to be paid because it was discretionary.

“There is no question that Mr Gagliardi made exceptional profit for the funds and Mr Lerch frequently praised his performance in that respect,” Mr Justice Calver said in his judgment. “Had [Evolution] properly performed the contract, Mr Gagliardi would have received a discretionary bonus of US$5,385,000.” The judge also said that Gagliardi was Lerch’s “prize asset” at Evolution.

Seth Redniss, Gagliardi’s lawyer, called the ruling a “decisive vindication”.

The trades of the former Segantii Capital Management employee came under scrutiny during a wide-ranging US probe into Morgan Stanley that coincided with his employment at Evolution. During the investigation, Gagliardi had his phone confiscated by US officials and frequently fell out with colleagues, the High Court was told. 

The hedge fund said the fact that Gagliardi’s trades had been scrutinised in the investigation that led to the Wall Street bank paying $249mn to settle last year was a factor in its decision not to pay the bonus. In particular, it pointed to his relationship to the former head of Morgan Stanley’s US equity syndicate, Pawan Passi.

In its original filing, Evolution — which countersued Gagliardi for the $7mn it paid him while working there — said the “inappropriate” relationship between the two amounted to a breach of trust.

The hedge fund gave him notice that it was terminating his contract in late February 2022. Gagliardi reiterated throughout the trial that he had been cleared of any wrongdoing by the SEC.

While Gagliardi faced intensive questioning in court over whether he had deliberately lost a mobile phone, the judge wrote in his judgment that he did not consider the trader’s evidence to be “dishonestly given”, adding that he remained “impressively calm” throughout his testimony.

Gagliardi also told the court that the subpoena he was served while employed by Evolution also listed some of “the biggest names” in equity capital markets, and that he “would have probably been insulted” if not included in the document.

Scrutinising his trading history, Paul Downes KC, representing Evolution, referenced several news stories, one of which described Gagliardi’s trading activity as being conducted in a “grey area”. Gagliardi dismissed their relevance, stating that “these are just journalists” and their job involved oversimplifications “like when I explain it to my mum in Queens”.

In its original filings and throughout the trial, Evolution described Gagliardi as an “abrasive” employee who breached risk limits on several occasions. Evolution argued that this was another reason it was able to deny his bonus, although it did not dismiss him at the time of the alleged offences.

In written arguments prepared for the High Court trial that concluded in October, Gagliardi’s lawyers said that, following several disagreements, he asked Lerch if he could be made co-chief investment officer in September 2021.

When his request was denied, Zoltan Varga, a former executive at hedge fund Och-Ziff Capital Management and “a key investor” in Evolution, asked Lerch whether he could offer Gagliardi another title. Lerch proposed his own title for Gagliardi: “Fnck face”.

Gagliardi also claimed that a month later, when Lerch was discussing with colleagues the possibility of the equity capital markets trader leaving Evolution, he commented that if he did, he “would learn the meaning of discretionary very fast”, referring to the disputed discretionary bonus.

Alongside Morgan Stanley’s settlement with the SEC, Passi admitted to misconduct for leaking confidential information to investors and was issued a $250,000 penalty. The authorities did not name or announce any actions against recipients of the information.

Evolution did not immediately respond to a request for comment.