MARTIN Shkreli – also commonly known as America’s most-hated man – launched a Web 3 business that aims to make early-stage drug discovery more affordable and accessible just two months after being released from prison for committing securities fraud.
But what is the story behind Shkreli and what is his net worth?
Who is Martin Shkreli?
Shkreli was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 17, 1983,
He skipped a number of grades in school and went on to receive a degree in business from New York’s Baruch College in 2004.
At just 17, he started his first internship at Cramer Berkowitz & Co, the hedge fund founded by Jim Cramer.
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Shkreli told Cramer Berkowitz & Co to short Regeneron Pharmaceuticals stock – a biotech company testing a weight-loss drug.
When its price dropped the firm profited drawing attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which investigated Shkreli’s knowledge about the stock, however, it was unable to prove any wrongdoing.
After four years at Cramer Berkowitz & Co, Shkreli moved to Intrepid Capital Management as a financial analyst and then UBS Wealth Management.
He then founded his first hedge fund, Elea Capital Management in 2006, but the fund closed a year later after a $2.3 million lawsuit from Lehman Brothers, which collapsed before it could collect its money.
Shkreli then started MSMB Capital Management in 2008.
In 2011, he founded biotech firm Retrophin, with the goal of finding medicine for rare diseases, but he was ousted as head of the company in 2014 following allegations he incorrectly handled legal settlements.
The company then filed a $65 million lawsuit claiming Shkreli had created Retrophin and took it public to pay off investors from his old hedge fund, MSMB when the fund went under.
Shkreli said: “They are sort of concocting this wild and crazy and unlikely story to swindle me out of the money.”
He then launched Turing Pharmaceuticals in February 2015.
Turing claimed to focus on treatments for serious diseases, with the website reading: “We are dedicated to helping patients, who often have no effective treatment options.”
The company only had two products on the market Daraprim and Vecamyl, which treat hypertension.
First developed in the 1950s, Daraprim is the best treatment for a rare parasitic infection called toxoplasmosis.
People who had weakened immune systems because of illnesses such as Aids, came to rely on the drug.
But Shkreli raised the price by 5000 per cent from $13.50 a pill to $750.
In 2018, Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison after being found guilty of two counts of securities fraud and one count of securities fraud conspiracy.
Shkreli was released from prison in May 2022 after serving four and a half years.
In July 2022, following Shkreli’s release from jail, he launched Web3 project Druglike.
Druglike is a Web3 drug-discovery company which is focused on free software to design and model chemical compounds.
Shrkeli said: “It’s a niche product, for sure, but it could change the way medicine is being made.”
He said licenses for traditional drug-design software can run from $50,000 to $100,000.
Shkreli said he’s “aghast” at the high price tag for drug-discovery software, adding: “Total cost of the ownership of this stuff is millions of dollars. So the ability to … squeeze it down almost to zero is my dream.”
Shkreli added: “Druglike is not a drug company. We don’t want to be a drug company. It can’t be a drug company. We make a piece of software and you sort of design something that could be a medicine.
“Once you’re done with that, you actually have to turn it from a simulation to a reality and that’s somebody else’s job.”
He also launched his own cryptocurrency called Martin Shkreli Inu following his release from jail.
But the token’s value plummeted by 90 per cent after a wallet – believed to be owned by Shkreli – sold more than 160 billion tokens.
Shkreli said “I got hacked” when asked about the massive transfer.
What is Martin Shkreli’s net worth?
Martin Shkreli’s net worth was around $70 million at its peak, however, following his conviction he was forced to return $64.6million in profits he and his former company made when increasing the price of Daraprim.
Shkreli was also ordered to forfeit $5 million from his ETrade account as well as $2.36 million in other assets, including a Pablo Picasso painting.
It is believed Martin Shkreli is now worth $0.