[sammyg2]

Originally Posted by Zeke

Not according to the SEC and the 51% increase in the stock's value while he held short.

The FTC fined them $200 million.

Herbalife is a multi-level marketing company. IOW con, scam (IMO).

The company has been criticized by, among others, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital, who claimed that Herbalife operates a "sophisticated pyramid scheme"[5][6] after taking a $1 billion short position in Herbalife stock.[7] Herbalife agreed to "fundamentally restructure" its business and pay a $200 million fine as part of a 2016 settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) following accusations of it being a pyramid scheme. The FTC said in a press release about the settlement "it's virtually impossible to make money selling Herbalife products."[8] In November 2017, Ackman's hedge fund closed out its short position in Herbalife.[9]

Now most of the time I would say "buyer beware" but the slick con men trick people into buying their BS garbage products in hopes of selling them to make money.
Most do not.
But they often do make money by recruiting other suckers who buy products, who don't make money. so they recruit suckers, and so on. .

Mark Reynolds Hughes (January 1, 1956 – May 21, 2000) was an American businessman who was the founder, chairman, and CEO of Herbalife International Ltd, a multi-level marketing company.

Multi-level marketing (MLM), also called pyramid selling,[1][2] network marketing,[2][3] and referral marketing,[4] is a marketing strategy for the sale of products or services where the revenue of the MLM company is derived from a non-salaried workforce selling the company's products/services, while the earnings of the participants are derived from a pyramid-shaped or binary compensation commission system.

Although each MLM company dictates its own specific financial compensation plan for the payout of any earnings to their respective participants, the common feature that is found across all MLMs is that the compensation plans theoretically pay out to participants only from two potential revenue streams. The first is paid out from commissions of sales made by the participants directly to their own retail customers. The second is paid out from commissions based upon the wholesale purchases made by other distributors below the participant who have recruited those other participants into the MLM; in the organizational hierarchy of MLMs, these participants are referred to as one's down line distributors.[5]

MLM salespeople are, therefore, expected to sell products directly to end-user retail consumers by means of relationship referrals and word of mouth marketing, but most importantly they are incentivized to recruit others to join the company's distribution chain as fellow salespeople so that these can become down line distributors.[3][6][7] According to a report that studied the business models of 350 MLMs, published on the Federal Trade Commission's website, at least 99% of people who join MLM companies lose money.[8][9] Nonetheless, MLMs function because downline participants are encouraged to hold onto the belief that they can achieve large returns, while the statistical improbability of this is de-emphasised. MLMs have been made illegal or otherwise strictly regulated in some jurisdictions as a mere variation of the traditional pyramid scheme, including in mainland China.[10][11]