Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum (Business Wire)

Hims is cozying up to retail investors

CEO Andrew Dudum and his company are engaging more and more with everyday investors. Meanwhile, more analysts on Wall Street who typically inform institutional investors see the company as a sell.

J. Edward Moreno

8/15/25 8:31AM

On August 10, a retail trader on X tagged Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum in a post saying they would “buy all in your stock” if he responded “hello.”

Dudum obliged:

“hello”
— andrewdudum (@AndrewDudum) August 10, 2025

The same day, the CEO replied to a Hims & Hers customer who was complaining about his gummies melting during shipping. “On it. What state?” Dudum wrote in response to the customer, whose bio says they’re “just a long term investor in high growth stocks with personal opinions.” A few hours later, the customer posted that Dudum’s responsiveness “has sold me on $HIMS stock. I’ll be investing tomorrow.”

Hims has emerged as a darling among retail investors, in part because its stock is volatile and the company frequently makes market-moving news. Dudum told Sherwood News earlier this year that he believes Hims retail investors are likely people who have used the service and had good experiences with it.

“That’s one of the beautiful parts of our business in the public markets,” he said at the time. “People who know the product, who know the service, who have experienced it and have been empowered by it and feeling better, those are the people going and buying shares of the stock. It’s actually just that they love the product.”

Hims stock has swung wildly this year, trading as high as nearly $70 and as low as just over $25. As some Wall Street analysts have become more bearish on the stock — three of the 16 analysts covering Hims have a “sell” rating on the stock, compared to none a year ago — Hims has leaned even more into the retail-investing community.

Dudum recently thanked Hims House, a bullish daily blog for the company’s retail investors, after it wished him a happy birthday. He responded with a laughing emoji to an investor’s post speculating that hormone treatments would launch that week. The post was paired with a GIF of a marmot screaming “ANDREW,” which has become a staple among Hims investors online.

When $HIMS announces TRT & Menopause launch dates this week, will you believe then?@AndrewDudum, it's time. pic.twitter.com/ZjeGDbepOr
— NightHawk Capital (@NighthawkTradez) July 13, 2025

This year, the company started regularly taking questions during earnings calls from Hims House. The blog first submitted questions in Q3 2024, but the company didn’t take them, said Jonathan Stern, who authors the blog. As retail interest grew, the company began asking Hims House for questions when it reported Q4 earnings in February, Stern said. Hims has answered questions from Hims House during the two earnings calls since.

Dudum opened things up even more broadly earlier this month, soliciting questions for the earnings call from the retail community on X days before Hims’ earnings report.

The company also sends press statements to Hims House, which are typically telegraphed in full on X. On Thursday, after Bloomberg reported that the FTC was still probing Hims, they did not respond to requests for comment from Bloomberg (or Sherwood) but sent a statement to Hims House.

While Dudum is busy embracing his investor community, his family trust has sold some of its shares in the company. Filings show that the trust sold 660,000 shares of Hims stock for $33.5 million last week, marking the largest open-market insider sale of Hims stock since the company went public in 2021.

A spokesperson for the company said Dudum remains the company’s largest shareholder and is “committed to the company’s long-term growth.” The spokesperson added, “The referenced sales were indirectly associated with Mr. Dudum, outside of his personal holdings, for tax and philanthropic purposes.”

It’s not uncommon for CEOs to embrace retail investors, especially if they’re bullish and less critical than analysts from the Street. Perhaps the most prominent example is Palantir and its CEO, Alex Karp.

Allen & Company Annual Conference Draws Media And Tech Leaders To Sun Valley — Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Palantir has cultivated one of Wall Street’s most devoted retail followings through frequent, bite-sized announcements and direct engagement from the company’s social media accounts. Hims does this as well, teasing the launch of Hers gummies and dropping hints of potential partnerships via X.

Like Hims, Palantir also takes questions from retail investors on its earnings calls. Karp hasn’t hidden his disdain for Wall Street analysts, who he says underestimate the company.

At the end of Palantir’s most recent earnings call on August 4, Karp gave a message to retail investors: “Maybe stop talking to all the haters. They’re suffering.”

Hims didn't respond to questions for this article as of publication.

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Hims’ COO to step into advisory role months after joining the company

Hims & Hers Chief Operating Officer Nader Kabbani — an Amazon veteran who joined the telehealth company in May — will leave his post next month, the company announced in a Thursday regulatory filing.

Kabbani will begin an advisory role with the company starting November 2 and Mike Chi, who is currently the company’s chief commercial officer, will assume Kabbani’s title and duties.

Kabbani, who helped launch Amazon Pharmacy at the robotics company Symbiotic, took over from Melissa Baird, the company’s longtime COO who transitioned to an advisory role earlier this year.

Kabbani joined Hims at a tumultuous time. The company saw explosive growth when it started selling copies of popular weight-loss drugs made by Novo Nordisk last year while they were in shortage. But now that those supply constraints have waned, it’s limited in how much it can continue selling. Meanwhile its core business has slowed down, which resulted in disappointing revenue numbers in its most recent quarterly report.

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CHICAGO, IL - JANUARY 14: Chicago Bulls mascot Benny the Bull during a game against the New Orleans Pelicans and the Chicago Bulls on January 14, 2025 at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois.

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AST SpaceMobile surges as satellite services theme gains market traction

Space stocks jumped on Thursday, led by a surge in AST SpaceMobile after Bell Canada named the Texas-based satellite services provider as a partner for a new direct-to-cellular service it plans to offer next year.

AST is up more than 20% just this week after announcing that its latest Bluebird 6 satellite was assembled, tested, and ready for launch and that its launch schedule appears to be on track.

“AST reiterated its expectation of launches every one to two months on average during 2025 and 2026, which is expected to result in between 45 and 60 satellites in orbit by the end of 2026,” wrote Louie DePalma, an analyst at William Blair. “Reaching 45 to 60 satellites in orbit is significant because it allows for continuous broadband coverage for AST’s core markets in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. We view this update positively.”

Space and satellite stocks Rocket Lab and Planet Labs ascended alongside AST Thursday. But all of these stocks are, in a sense, drafting off dynamics being driven by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the leader in the private space sector.

The company has played a key role in lowering the costs of space launches, thereby “fostering intense competition and accelerating innovation across the sector. This has led to significantly lower launch prices, reshaping the economics of deploying large-scale Low Earth Orbit constellations,” wrote Barclays analysts in a recent note on the outlook for the satellite industry. This has opened up new possibilities such as providing consumer broadband services, they noted.

Bell Canada to roll out direct-to-cell satellite service in 2026

“AST reiterated its expectation of launches every one to two months on average during 2025 and 2026, which is expected to result in between 45 and 60 satellites in orbit by the end of 2026,” wrote Louie DePalma, an analyst at William Blair. “Reaching 45 to 60 satellites in orbit is significant because it allows for continuous broadband coverage for AST’s core markets in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. We view this update positively.”

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There’s an immense need for power to fuel the AI data centers playing the starring role in driving up electricity prices.

Mizuho just isn’t sure that the high-flying fuel cell company Bloom Energy is well placed to provide it.

Analyst Maheep Mandloi cited the firm’s internal constraints on growth in lowering his rating on the stock to “neutral” from “outperform,” suggesting that Bloom will likely need to develop a bigger pipeline of customers before expanding its manufacturing footprint.

Still, he hiked his price target to $79 from $48 while downgrading the stock.

Last week, JPMorgan flagged that retail traders were beginning to sour on the shares, which had enjoyed a massive run-up that kicked into high gear thanks to a deal with Oracle announced in late July to supply power to data centers.

Wall Street is broadly negative on Bloom Energy, relative to most of the universe of the stocks the sell side covers. Its consensus rating, per analysts polled by Bloomberg, is just shy of 3.35. For reference, that’s a worse average rating than nearly 90% of the stocks in the S&P 500 (which Bloom is not a part of).

Jefferies downgraded the stock last week on the same day Bank of America analysts wrote, “We are still not buying into BE’s AI hype.” Nonetheless, most are still revising price targets higher to account for the stock’s move. But all that leaves the average price target well below where the shares are currently trading.

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WDC JPM Retail Radar Chart — A chart from JPM’s Retail Radar note showing increased retail buying of WDC.

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