Eli Lilly’s Obesity Pill & Tim Cook at the White House 8/7/25

0:00Bring in show music please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. Apple planting roots closer to home. The iPhone maker promising to invest$100 billion in the U.S. CEO Tim Cook made a special trip to the Oval Office. Did you catch any of it? Some of it, yeah. Did you see Tim Cook give President Trump a gift? Author Walter Isaacson joins us on the new normal between President Trump and America's CEOs. What he did is a good thing. The notion of, OK, we're going to bring some manufacturing back in America. You have to remember, Steve Jobs was fixated on that. But Tim Cook isn't the only corporate leader in the president's sights.

0:43Intel's Lip Bhutan is now in the hot seat, and so is the company's board. When the administration says jump, corporate America says how high. And ride share at Lyft reports its best quarter ever. CEO David Risher joins us. To a certain extent, you know, look elsewhere if you're looking for weakness because we're not seeing it. Plus, tariff day is here and Eli Lilly is out with results from a key weight loss pill trial. I just can't believe that name wasn't taken already. What is it? Orfaglipron. You've practiced it. No, I, hey. It's Thursday, August 7th, 2025. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand by Joe in three, two, one.

1:25Here's Mike. Good morning. Welcome back. Welcome to. Welcome to Squawk Box. Glad you're here. I'm here, live from the NASDAQ Market site. I heard Melissa Lee was going to be in today because Becky is off, and I said, I got to get a haircut. I got to get cleaned up. I approve. High and tight. I was able to finally get an appointment. Thank God, because I wanted to look my absolute best. Thank you for being here. Isveria, are you doing your show again tonight? Of course. The double duty is sometimes people that sit in don't have to do their shows later, but you want to. My show is my priority. Your show is your pride and joy.

2:07Andrew will be with us. I don't think he's in Aspen now, but he's on his way back, but he's stopping somewhere to do some big interviews. Not a hint of irony when we say slapping on new tariffs, the market up 250 points. No one's thinking that's not what you were told would happen, was it, by a lot of people. Anyway, there it is. And Apple is helping both the Dow and the NASDAQ. Treasury yields after Friday still haven't gotten out of this new range that we're in. There's a 10-year at 424. I never talked to you about it, but we had someone that was all in Jeremy Siegel. For yield inversion purposes, he compares the 10-year to Fed funds.

2:50He doesn't do it to the three-month or the six-month or the two-year. Oh, really? Which puts us in very restrictive territory. In other words, we're above the Fed funds. The short rate is even above where the 10 year is. I was just wondering what you thought about that. But we've got to talk about this other stuff first. I should have told you about it in makeup. I should have mentioned that while we were talking about all the other stuff. You're too busy with your hair. For some reason, the tag was, I had it in front. And, you know, I've got to get the tag and the Velcro around back. People still believe that.

3:25Pulling it on. Oh, this is me again. Look, it's just you. Oh, yeah, it's you, you. Sorry. That's okay. You're ready. Obviously, you're ready to go. President Trump's tariffs on countries around the world going into effect earlier this morning. A post on True Social, the president said, it's midnight. Millions, billions of dollars in tariffs are now flowing into the United States of America. Most imports, though, in the U.S. will face a baseline 10 % tariff. Brazil and India are facing 50 percent levies. Brazil appears to have kicked in now at this point. And India's are set to rise to 50 percent in a few weeks.

4:02And that increase is tied to putting pressure on Russia to the U.S., to the country's purchase of Russian oil. Now we're hearing there might even be a meeting, Witkoff said, between President Trump and Vladimir Putin. Switzerland is scrambling, but currently has one of the highest tariff rates at 39 percent. The Swiss president traveling to the U.S. this week, but so far unable to reach a deal. China and Mexico are in trade limbo for the moment as negotiations with the U.S. continue. Meantime, President Trump vowing big tariffs on computer chips unless companies manufacture them in the United States.

4:41CNBC's Megan Casella is live in Washington with that. Megan, good morning. Hey, Melissa, good morning. So really, for the first time, the president offering us last night a preview of just how high he's looking to lift those tariffs on all imports of semiconductors as soon as sometime this month. Take a listen. We'll be putting a terraform of approximately 100 percent on chips and semiconductors. But if you're building in the United States of America, there's no charge, even though you're building and you're not producing yet in terms of the big numbers of jobs and all of the things that you're building.

5:17If you're building, there will be no charge. So potentially significant

5:26in the U.S., as he later said, will also be excluded. So we do have to see how this is ultimately written. But the list of companies with at least commitments to build here is long, especially after that CHIPS Act rollout last year. That includes Intel, TSMC, IBM, NVIDIA, many, many other big names, all potentially shielded from this move. So a couple of notes on these tariffs in the meantime. These would be imposed under Section 232. That requires the Commerce Department to find that semiconductor imports represent a threat to U.S. national security. So I've been told that investigation is expected to wrap up as soon as sometime this month and tariffs could come very shortly after.

6:03So that leaves the big questions now being just how significant any exemptions would be. And then on the other hand, how broadly the tariffs are going to be written and whether, as they could, ultimately include any derivative products such as smartphones or other devices that include semiconductors as well. Guys. And that's what it sounded like, Megan, this morning that, you know, for Apple, for instance, they would have an exemption. But there would be some sort of additional levy on those products that use the semiconductors. So is it just semiconductors solely or do we have an idea as to whether or not in finished products those will face some sort of tax as well?

6:40I think that's going to be the biggest question now after we've heard some of these details from the president. The way that the investigation itself is written. And I've looked at this as they launched it several months ago now. They wrote it so that it could be as broad essentially as they want it to be. It could be any product that includes a semiconductor is also under investigation and ultimately could also face tariffs. That's a very big difference, of course, from being just chips to anything that includes a chip in it, really shaking the entire technology market if they wrote it that way.

7:10We don't know that they would go that aggressive. They could sort of reserve that card and say in the beginning it's only going to be about the chips themselves or something to that effect. But we know that they've at least launched the investigation with that in mind, reserving that possibility, which would then be a big change. Megan, thanks. Megan Casella. By the way, it's worth noting TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor, it is surging because the trade minister said that it was exempt from these tariffs. So we're seeing huge reactions on the back of that. Meantime, take a look at this. President Trump hosting Apple CEO Tim Cook in the White House yesterday.

7:49They announced Apple would invest another$100 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. The investments are aimed at bringing more of Apple's supply chains and manufacturing to the United States. But there was no commitment to make iPhones in the U.S. Apple's been an investor in other countries a little bit. I won't say which ones, but a couple. and they're coming home. I'm proud to say that Apple is leading the creation of an end-to-end silicon supply chain right here in America from design to equipment to wafer production to fabrication to packaging. Companies involved in Apple's so-called American manufacturing program include Corning, Applied Materials, Texas Instruments and Global Foundries, just to name a few.

8:36You see all of them up in the after-hour session yesterday on the back of that announcement. Did you catch any of it? Some of it, yeah. Did you see Tim Cook give President Trump a gift? It looked like a hunk of gold with this piece of glass on it. There you go. But it's on a gold plate. Look at that. That's at least gold-plated, if not gold. I've been in the new Oval Office, and there's some gold. There's gold on the ceiling. That's a Black Keys song, I think, gold on the ceiling. It is, now that I think, but there's gold everywhere, and it's beautiful. It matches the decor. It does look beautiful, but it's the Trump gold.

9:19So, yes, it will match very well. What I was thinking was over the years, and even in the last administration, we've talked about Tim Cook's relationship with President Trump, which he took some flack for at different times. And earlier, at the beginning of this term, he definitely has a relationship and I think realizes it's important for Apple to have a relationship with President Trump, when a lot of people probably didn't. But recently, you know, who supplanted him as the president's favorite tech mogul was Jensen. Yeah. Jensen,$4.3 trillion. Apple,$3.1 trillion. And not surprising, maybe, that Tim Cook was back in the Oval Office.

10:04He had to. And look at the investment. $100 billion, an additional$100 billion. On top of the$500, yeah. Right, right. But it gained in market cap$150 billion in yesterday's session. And then add to that the 3 % that it's gaining in today's session. And technically. It's paid for itself already. It has. And technically, you could have seen it coming, and you probably did on Fast Money, because the analyst community was finally saying, you know what, I'm ready. You know, I've been thinking Apple is going to be fine, but all year long I've been suffering since the beginning of the year. I think it's finally things are changing.

10:39They're not going to be able without a new product. They're not going to be able to keep living off the ecosystem and that buzz. And you knew that the minute people finally said they're going to start throwing in the towel on Apple, you knew it's probably going back to new highs all the time. I don't know. Well, it's still below off. Yeah. Yeah. Anytime you have the demise of Apple has been greatly exaggerated. Going all the way back. And I agree with that. I agree with that completely. Do you know it fell to$9 billion? See, I'm so old. I remember. It fell to a market cap of$9 billion after, I don't know, Gil Emilio was there or John Scully.

11:10I mean, they went through. Even when Tim Cook took over, there were great doubts about Tim Cook. There was. How can this operations guy take over Apple and lead it to new heights? Right. And he did. And he did. It's extremely well understood. That doesn't mean that the events say that the skeptics are going to come in and say this time is different. Well, I mean, I think it's$600 billion. What do your traders say? What do your traders say? It doesn't solve the problem of not being the AI. I know. What do your traders say? Do you know? They're all different? You wouldn't bet against Apple, but there are challenges for the stock.

11:44You got any real hardcore bulls? Any real hardcore bears? Anyone on either side? Bulls and that, yes, people will hold Apple. Okay. Yeah. I mean, you can't be more bullish than owning it, right? I like to watch those guys. They're nimble. They are nimble. You can join us tonight, Joe. When you need me, I'll join you. News that we've, I guess, been waiting for from Eli Lilly. Got a look at the stock. Although we'll show you that Angelica Peebles is here and joins us now. But as you're talking, we should take a quick look at the early morning action in the shares. But take it away. Yeah, that early morning action, not good.

12:22The stock down about 6 % right now. And that's after we got this highly anticipated data on its obesity pill. And clearly there's some disappointment. So let's go through the numbers. People lost about 12 % of their body weight after a little more than a year at the highest dose. Now, some analysts were looking for more like between 13 % and 15%. And why is that 15 % important? It's because that's how much people lost weight, how much weight they lost on Novo's Wagovi. And the premise of this pill, or for Glyperon, is that it's a once-daily pill that works just as well as the weekly shot Wagovi.

12:54So you have an alternative. Now, on to the side effects. About 10 % of the people on the highest dose stop taking the pill because of gastrointestinal issues. Those are things like nausea, vomiting, and that's a bit higher than what we've seen for other GLP-1s. Though the rate of side effects like nausea and vomiting, they are similar to Wagovi. But more surprisingly, one quarter of patients at the highest dose stopped taking the drug for any reason. Now, we don't know exactly what those reasons are, and we will get the full results at a medical meeting next month. Nonetheless, I did talk to a number of doctors yesterday who are excited about this pill.

13:29And that's because they hope that it's easier to make than other GLP-1s. And that should translate it into being cheaper, which might mean that more people can receive these drugs because, of course, right now access is a big problem. And Lilly is expecting results from one more trial this quarter. And then they plan to file for FDA approval by the end of this year. So it is a pill. I mean, I didn't see the transition from the needles to the pills. So it's in full effect right now for the GLP-1 because I've seen advertisements that you put drops in something. No. That's fake. We have no FDA-approved pills at this point for obesity.

14:06Okay. But eventually on the way, I would admit. This is a pill. This one. What's wrong with 12? Yeah, daily pill, 12? And that's the thing. And that's where I think we have to take a step back because obviously investors wanted to see more. They wanted to see 15%. And I do think the questions are going to be on the discontinuation. But when you talk to doctors, they say, look, like there was one doctor from UNC that I talked to, And she said, right now, the alternative is nothing because people aren't getting access. So if it's 12 % versus nothing, I'll take it. If you're seriously obese, 12 might not do it.

14:39But if you just want to lose some weight. But 12 is better than not having access. 12 % if you're a 200-pound person and you lose 12, that's exactly what you're trying to do. I think it's a 300-pounder. 10 % is because this was the next holy grail. This is going to be the next way. This was putting Lilly out in front decisively versus Novo in the eyes of investors. And you see Novo shares in the pre-market up pretty strongly. GPCR, Structure Therapeutics, which has a pill in the pipeline. Novo got crushed yesterday. That's also higher pre-market. Novo got crushed yesterday, I think, didn't it?

15:10Not crushed. Last week. Was it last week? Days are blending together. But yes, still not great yesterday. But, I mean, this does, I think people saw this pill as a slam dunk. We saw the data earlier this year from that, excuse me, diabetes trial. And people thought, OK, if you can lose 8 % with type 2 diabetes where we see less weight loss, we're going to see way more here. And we're not. And that's, I think, why you're seeing disappointment. Novo does also have a pill that they're expected to launch at the end of this year. And people have really written it off. Like nobody's been excited about that.

15:43But now if you have these lackluster results from Lilly, maybe they have more of a case. I just can't believe that that name wasn't taken already. what is it? Orfaglipron. Orfaglipron. That was available? I mean, I saw that come up in the, you've practiced it. No, hey, I've got a lot of time to talk about it. Did you see it come up in the telephone? O-R-F-O-R-G-L-I-P-R-O-N. Yeah. And it was available. And it was available. I would have snapped that baby up. Yeah. Where did they get that? That's the worst pill. I mean, that's the worst name. Well, that won't be the brand name when it eventually No, I know.

16:23I know. But surely they'll come up with something snappier like that bound or shot. All right. I don't know. I'm not a brand marketer, but. But you play one on TV. No, you actually don't. In terms of FDA approval, though, in time to market, does this change the expectation of the time frame or no? No, they're still expecting that they will. Once they get that second data set to this quarter, they'll be ready to file by the end of this year. So they're still expecting next year. And again, like talking to doctors yesterday, people were saying, it's not a big deal. We're going to overlook that. But again, the premise is just that if this this needs to be less expensive than the shots.

17:00And so that's what we need to hear from Lily is truly, will this be the thing that gets this drug into the hands of more people? For them, it's cheaper to make. You don't have all the cold chain requirements. So theoretically, this is still a viable option. And I don't want to downplay that. This is not a failure. This is still a drug that works. But is it as competitive? Is it a slam dunk that people thought? That's the question. All right, Angelica, thank you. Angelica Peebles. Next on Squawk Pod from the corner office to the Oval Office, CEOs at the White House, Tim Cook rebuilding his relationship with President Trump by giving him some of what he wants.

17:37Apple has committed to more manufacturing in the U.S. Author and professor Walter Isaacson weighs in. If we're designing something like Apple phones in California and then throwing them over an ocean to have other people build them, you don't get the feedback loop you have when your engineers and designers are right there watching on the factory floor. That's what Steve Jobs believed in. That's what Elon Musk believed in. He would know. The Elon Musk and Steve Jobs biographer joins us next.

18:10This is Squawk Pod from CNBC. Today with Joe Kernan and Melissa Lee. President Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook announcing an additional$100 billion manufacturing deal. Joining us now, CNBC contributor Walter Isaacson. He's written books on Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. You know, when we intro you, Walter, and we start talking about who you've written books, I want to keep going because you, I mean, the list is like mind-boggling. Who else? So Da Vinci, who else? You know, Jennifer Downd is the one you got to watch because she's the one who created the gene editing technology. CRISPR. That's another one.

18:50That's just as consequential. She's great. Yeah. You are also an advisory partner at Perella Weidenberg and a professor at Tulane University. Can you just, I know you're next, you know, you wrote about Steve Jobs, but you know so much about Elon and Apple and everything else. What do you think of Tim Cook's navigating the President Trump in the administration. I think it's pretty good. He's pretty good. It's very straightforward. You know, he's not one of these emotional people who wants to be the best bro of the president of the United States or somebody who wants to have their hair on fire and be attacking him.

19:27And you look at Jamie Dimon, Tim Cook, people who know how to do that. More importantly, what he did is a good thing. The notion of, okay, we're going to bring some manufacturing back in America. You have to remember, Steve Jobs was fixated on that. He was obsessed about building factories in Fremont, California. He even picked the tone of white paint for the walls and the pastels for the machines. In the end, he's ousted. Eventually, it doesn't work, manufacturing the machines there. But in America, we lose out on something. If we're designing something, like Apple phones in California, and then throwing them over an ocean to have other people build them, You don't get the feedback loop you have when your engineers and designers are right there watching on the factory floor.

20:17That's what Steve Jobs believed in. That's what Elon Musk believed in. How do we do it? Is it is it feasible? Because that's the headline and just about every paper. The president wants to do it. But it's not feasible to build iPhones in this country. Can we piecemeal go towards that and start doing components? And can we eventually get there? You can go piecemeal, but in some ways that's not the holy grail because what Steve Jobs wanted to do was to control parts end to end when he did the original Macintosh where he made it himself. Likewise, Elon Musk, when he took over Tesla, it had supply chains around the world.

20:58It was doing a chassis in England and battery packs in Thailand. He brings it all in. And then you have a better integrated product and you have people who are designing and engineering it who know what it's like to manufacture it. And the answer to can we do it in America? Of course we can. We can do it. We've always had an ability to do manufacturing. I must admit, you know, it doesn't happen on your show much, but people ought to admit mistakes every now and then. For about 30 years, this is the beginning of the 1990s, I was kind of in favor of free trade, offshoring. I thought it would increase our wealth.

21:34In the end, I think it's important for us to have the capacity to go from the microchip to the phone, to the glass on the front of the iPhone, whatever it may be. And in Louisiana, Mississippi, where I grew up, there used to be a lot of manufacturing. It would be great to bring some of that back to America, especially for high-end products. It's, you know, where eventually you run into one of the most sacrosanct, you know, theorems in economics is comparative advantage. You have to just throw that out the window. But is there some middle? Not necessarily. I'd put my thumb on this. Quasi, pseudo.

22:10Can we do it some way and still stay faithful to that? Yeah, obviously there's a tug. You know, tariffs have downsides and indeed you want the comparative advantage. But when you have a global supply chain system, and that's what Tim Cook was an expert in when Steve Jobs in the late 90s decided he couldn't build factories in America, didn't want to. He hires Tim Cook, who knows how to do an orchestrate like a wizard, complex supply chains. And, yeah, there's an advantage. There's a comparative advantage of each country. You create more wealth. I would not be doing the scattershot complicated tariffs that Trump is announcing and then unannouncing.

22:51But you want to put your finger on the scale and say, if you build in America, you got a 10 percent advantage or maybe a 15 percent advantage. And if you had something like that, you wouldn't be moving a whole lot of manufacturing back to America. But you'd be bringing some because you say when we talk comparative advantage, let's put our finger on the scale just like other countries. This is Walter Isaacson 2.0. You have moved this way a little bit. You know, I told you that. I mean, I know this always shocks people where you say, well, you said 20 years ago that you were a total free trader and you believed in the Davos-Aspen consensus.

23:28You know, I look at things. I look at how that created wealth. It was a wonderful system that made us richer. But it also hollowed out the fact that people who could buy a cheap flat screen TV set on a Sunday night at Walmart, they no longer had the chance to get on the bus to go to the factory the next morning and make a decent job. And so, yeah, I applaud a push to move manufacturing back to America, move all sorts of production back to America. I'm not wild about the scattershot way that President Trump is doing it. But I've been, you know, I read Orrin Cass. I've been reading J.D. Vance, others.

24:08There is some sense to the fact that maybe those of us who believed in the Aspen-Davos consensus that enshrined free trade as almost it was engraved on a tablet from either, you know, a tablet and handed down to us from the gods. No, that didn't help a middle class in America. Walter, I'm going to jump in here because we're watching Intel stock sink by three and a half percent right now. President Trump just posting on Truth Social. The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately. There is no other solution to this problem. Thank you for your attention to this problem. Again, the stock is down by three point five percent.