| Today’s Businessweek Daily is a special edition featuring stories from the August issue of the magazine, available online now. Editor Brad Stone is here with a preview. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up for the newsletter here. You can also subscribe to get the print edition. In early June, after Elon Musk broke with the Trump administration over the One Big Beautiful Bill and started noisily feuding with the president on X, aerospace startups started receiving phone calls. It was the Pentagon, checking on the development of their orbital rockets—perhaps a bit desperate to see whether there were any alternatives to SpaceX’s workhorse Dragon. The calls, described in the August cover story of Bloomberg Businessweek, made sense. During their remarkably juvenile fight, President Donald Trump threatened to cancel federal contracts with Musk’s companies, and Musk in turn warned that he would decommission the Dragon, NASA’s only way of reaching the International Space Station. Musk seemed to soften for a time and deleted his most lancing tweets (for example, the one that suggested Trump was prominently featured in the Epstein files). But they were part of a pattern, as Max Chafkin and Ed Ludlow write in our cover story, “Elon Musk’s Empire Is Creaking Under the Strain of Elon Musk.” The world’s richest man can be his own worst enemy. Over the past two decades, Musk has demonstrated an uncanny ability to invent his way out of near bankruptcies and massive manufacturing headaches. His current bets—a Tesla robotaxi network, the Starship rocket that has yet to fly safely and the artificial intelligence startup xAI that’s losing more than $1 billion a month—are as far-fetched as anything he’s tried. His political misadventures in the MAGA movement and inflammatory posting on X seem to be alienating his customers and imperiling his vast web of companies. Elsewhere in the August issue, we have two other tales of companies awkwardly navigating Trump’s political movement. Hims & Hers Health is the telemedicine upstart known for both its promiscuous advertising and generic offerings of Viagra and Rogaine. For the past year, the company has also sold compounded versions of GLP-1s, the coveted weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound, and its stock took off as a result. Now the Food and Drug Administration has ruled that the GLP-1 shortage is over, and Hims faces regulatory changes that make its sales more difficult. Andrew Dudum, the chief executive officer of Hims, first tried to save the business with a partnership with Novo Nordisk, the maker of Wegovy and Ozempic, which quickly failed. Now he’s courting the Make America Healthy Again movement (while, hilariously, running a doughnut store as a side hustle). It may not work. As part of a package about how companies, entrepreneurs and even individual customs brokers are operating amid Trump’s ever-changing trade war, we profile a company whose products you might be wearing right now. The Japan-based YKK is the world’s largest maker of zippers, holding together everything from jeans and purses to suitcases and tents. Executives for its global network of factories have been sorely tested by shifting tariffs and trade agreements. “No supply chains can really react to that kind of whipsawing adjustment,” says Jim Reed, president of YKK Corp. of America. All that plus why declining vaccine rates make countries less prosperous, why the hottest trend in jewelry is the 100-year-old art deco movement, and why the real antagonist in the new Alien TV show isn’t the deadly saliva-dripping xenomorph but the shadowy company trying to capture it. | 
