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In an industrial park a half-hour outside Prague, Peter Magic finds himself at the center of a gold rush. In the 15 years since he started his business as a teenager in his parents’ garage in Slovakia, it’s developed into a fast-growing company with almost nine figures in annual revenue and an international clientele. He isn’t training a new kind of agentic artificial intelligence that replaces your employer’s legal department or building the next online prediction market. His company, Janoshik Analytical, does purity and sterility testing for black-market anabolic steroids, an obscure niche Magic found during his own foray into weightlifting. His search for other lifters online took him to 4chan and Reddit, where many talked freely about their pharmaceutical experimentation but fretted about what might be in their drugs. Magic figured testing steroid samples couldn’t be that hard. “It took a couple of years, actually, before we got all the processes perfected, because obviously, legally, this is pretty thin ice,” he says. Among connoisseurs, his testing has become the gold standard. Outside, in his lab’s parking lot, he has the shimmering purple Ferrari to prove it.

As it turns out, Magic’s reputation for running a legitimate business evaluating illicit substances has positioned him perfectly for a new black market: the global trade in peptides. For more on the show, Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec, spoke with Amanda Mull, Bloomberg Businessweek Senior Reporter and Madison Muller, Bloomberg News US Health Care Reporter

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The Billion-Dollar Peptides Gold Rush

Bloomberg Businessweek

The Billion-Dollar Peptides Gold Rush