And what a lot of these companies do is so far beyond speculation. “I often view stock markets as big gambling machines, if you’re gonna speculate, you have to be prepared to lose. “At a young age I saw a lot of investment strategies that worked,” he said. Through it, Shkreli got an internship at Cramer, Berkowitz & Co., the hedge fund managed by Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money. “Fighting with your parents, focusing on the opposite sex more than academics.” He played basketball and was part of a rock band. “I went through all the normal high school stuff,” he said. Shkreli was sent to Hunter College High School, a public school for gifted kids in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He made money for a while, he said, then eventually lost it. At 12, he convinced his father to give him $2,000 to invest on the stock market using their family computer and a dial-up modem. He was bright and persuasive, and skipped several grades. Shkreli had siblings but said he distinguished himself early on as the “alpha male” among them. “We struggled a lot, but I learned the importance of family, the importance of keeping a family together… I definitely didn’t learn anything technical from my parents,” he told me. They worked mostly in menial jobs as janitors and doormen, and lived in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, NY. Shkreli was born in March 1983, to parents who immigrated from Croatia and Albania. “If people derive some psychological benefit from that, then I don’t want to deprive them of it. “People want a villain,” Shkreli told me, calmly. “I’d be extremely shocked if anyone was worse off because of what we You are basically just a cartoon supervillain, aren’t you? Put a live chicken in your underwear. In one such interview, he said the Daraprim price hike was “not excessive at all.”
#DAYS BEFORE RODEO GENIUS TV#
In TV interviews, he sometimes comes off as insensitive, smug, and infuriatingly out of touch. At 32, he looks like a biotech Richie Rich, with slick hair and navy blue suits. He’s the poster boy for his company, Turing, and symbolizes everything wrong with the medical industry in America. “I’ll be your villain.”Īt the center of the controversy is the self-proclaimed villain, Shkreli. Users of the drug, called Daraprim, include cancer patients, AIDS patients, and pregnant women - people who don’t need anything else to worry about.
Senate panel launched a bipartisan probe into Shkreli’s company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, and three others, to take a closer look at the way they were pricing lifesaving drugs.Īpart from the insanity of the numbers - the price hike Turing made was from $13.50 a pill to $750 - the drug is used by some of the most vulnerable people imaginable: those who can’t fight off a parasitic infection because they have a weakened immune system. You shouldn’t tweet that.” The latest, a federal inquiry It’s been a PR nightmare for his company. He’s been under investigation by the SEC, the cops, the senate, and pummelled with scandals and lawsuits since he was 19-years-old. Tomorrow I’ll lay out a plan to take it on. Price gouging like this in the specialty drug market is outrageous. Hillary Clinton even tweeted about it, setting off a plunge in biotech stocks. The internet was ablaze with indignation.
People were furious with Martin Shkreli, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, after his company jacked up the price of a drug by 5000% overnight. I know you’ve seen this story, because it was the biggest thing on the internet last month.
When I asked him if he would do anything differently, he said, simply, “No.” ICYMI
One whose track record indicates that in many cases, he’s not to be trusted. One determined to rise from his working class roots, willing to be hated, and open to business dealings that are the border of what’s moral and legal. What I saw was more complicated: a man who’s brilliant, calculating, sometimes kind and possibly sociopathic. I’m still wondering whether Shkreli is the monster the world has imagined him to be: a smug, unapologetic asshole. By the end of our two-hour conversation, I didn’t hate him.įYI, this is Martin Shkreli, the 32-year-old dude who changed the price of an AIDS drug from $13.50 to $750 and is now under investigation by a senate committee and the U.S. I spoke to the most hated guy on the internet and something funny happened.
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