The New York Times published a glowing profile of Medvi last week, billing it as a "$1.8 billion company" built by two brothers using AI tools. Reporter Erin Griffith's piece reads like a startup fairy tale: Matthew Gallagher used ChatGPT and other AI tools to build a telehealth empire from his living room, hitting $401 million in sales last year. Sam Altman even weighed in, saying he'd 'like to meet the guy' who proved his prediction about one-person billionaire companies. There's just one problem. Most of it is nonsense.
Medvi has no official valuation. No outside funding. The "$1.8 billion" figure comes from extrapolating early-2026 sales across a full year, which is like calling someone who finds a twenty on the sidewalk a future millionaire. But the misleading numbers are almost beside the point. Techdirt's Mike Masnick reports that Medvi is currently facing an FDA warning letter and class action lawsuits for spam and selling products that may not work. The company's actual use of AI? Fake doctor profiles. Deepfaked before-and-after photos. Synthetic testimonials from patients who don't exist.
The Gallaghers aren't AI pioneers. They're direct-response marketers who previously ran branded dropshipping operations in the supplements space. They've built a middleman operation, using generative AI to scale deceptive marketing. Hacker News commenters described it as "bullshit-as-a-service." The real story here is that AI tools lower the barrier to committing large-scale fraud, and even legacy publications like the NYT can get seduced by a narrative they wanted to believe.