That guy who made medicine real pricey
It would be difficult to have avoided the name (and mousy little face) Martin Shkreli if you’ve been online recently. Shkreli, a pharmaceutical executive, made headlines after raising the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim by more than 5,000 percent, from $13.50 per pill to $750 per pill.
Shkreli stayed in the news by being incredibly smug and shitty about the whole thing, refusing to lower the price while claiming that all the attention nets him, “50-100 date solicitations a day” and bragging about how much money he has like a complete asshole. A competing pharmaceutical company then made a one dollar version of the pill.
Recently, Shkreli was back in the news, revealed as the mysterious buyer of the sole copy of the new Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. It was auctioned off to the highest bidder and, surprise surprise, it ended up being Shkreli who paid “millions” for it ($2 million is the current reported price).
Ok, but why am I writing about this? Well, Shkreli is also the chairman of pro League of Legends squad Team Imagine, where he goes by the handle “Cerebral.”
And Team Imagine chairman Martin “Cerebral” Shkreli was arrested by the FBI today. Nothing to do with League of Legends, Wu Tang, or his current company’s drug price hike. “He is accused of repeatedly losing money for investors and lying to them about it, illegally taking assets from one of his companies to pay off debtors in another,” according to Bloomberg.
“Shkreli essentially ran his company like a Ponzi scheme where he used each subsequent company to pay off defrauded investors from the prior company,” Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said at a press conference.
Shkreli denies the allegations of fraud and was released on a $5 million bond because he is incredibly wealthy and a very eligible bachelor that many women want to sleep with.
The FBI failed to recover the Wu-Tang album.
#Breaking no seizure warrant at the arrest of Martin Shkreli today, which means we didn’t seize the Wu-Tang Clan album.
— FBI New York (@NewYorkFBI) December 17, 2015
Shkreli, Drug Price Gouger, Denies Fraud and Posts Bail [Bloomberg]
