Martin Shkreli

Martin Shkreli (; born March 17, 1983) is an American investor and businessman. Shkreli is the co-founder of the hedge funds Elea Capital, MSMB Capital Management, and MSMB Healthcare, the co-founder and former CEO of pharmaceutical firms Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals, and the former CEO of start-up software company Gödel Systems, which he founded in August 2016.

In September 2015, Shkreli was widely criticized when Turing obtained the manufacturing license for the antiparasitic drug Daraprim and raised its price to insurance companies from $13.50 to $750.00 (USD) per pill, sparking a scandal in the United States and around the world, cementing his reputation as 'the most hated man in America'.

In 2017, Shkreli was convicted in federal court on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and up to $7.4 million in fines. In the civil antitrust case, Shkreli was fined a further $64.6 million to be repaid to victims. In May 2022, he was released early from the low-security federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania. He is permanently banned from serving as an officer of any publicly traded company.

Shkreli was born in Coney Island Hospital in the New York City borough of Brooklyn on March 17, 1983. His parents were Roman Catholic, and he said his religion has been "a guiding post" for him, although he does not believe in God. His parents emigrated to the United States from Albania and worked as janitors. His two sisters and his brother grew up in a working-class community in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Shkreli was raised Catholic and attended Sunday school as a child.

Shkreli attended Hunter College High School. Sources differ on whether Shkreli graduated from Hunter or whether he was expelled before his senior year and received the credits necessary for his high school diploma through City-As-School High School. He ended up in a program that placed him in an internship at Wall Street hedge fund Cramer, Berkowitz and Company when he was 17. Shkreli received a bachelor's degree in business administration from Baruch College in 2004.

Shkreli told Vanity Fair that he developed an interest in chemistry when a family member suffered from treatment-resistant depression.

During Shkreli's time at Cramer, Berkowitz and Company, he recommended short-selling the stock of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company testing a weight-loss drug. When its price dropped in accordance with Shkreli's prediction, Cramer's hedge fund profited. Shkreli's prediction drew the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which investigated Shkreli's knowledge about the stock but was unable to prove wrongdoing on his part.

After four years as an associate at Cramer Berkowitz, Shkreli worked as a financial analyst for Intrepid Capital Management and UBS Wealth Management. He then started his first hedge fund, Elea Capital Management, in 2006. In 2007, Lehman Brothers sued Elea in New York state court for failing to cover a 'put option transaction' in which Shkreli bet the wrong way on a broad market decline. When stocks rose, Shkreli did not have the money to cover his losses. In October 2007, Lehman Brothers won a $2.3 million default judgment against Shkreli and Elea, but Lehman collapsed before it could collect on the ruling.

In September 2009, Shkreli and a childhood friend Marek Biestek started MSMB Capital Management, which took its name from the initials of the two. Shkreli and Biestek shorted biotech companies, then described flaws in the companies on stock trading chat rooms.

On February 1, 2011, in a naked short sale on an account it held with Merrill Lynch, MSMB Capital sold short 32 million shares of Orexigen Therapeutics stock at about $2.50 per share the day after its price plunged from $9.09, when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declined to approve the drug naltrexone/bupropion (Contrave). The stock price rebounded; MSMB could not cover the position, although it had told Merrill Lynch that it could. Merrill Lynch lost $7 million on the trade and MSMB Capital was virtually wiped out. Retrophin's 2015 SEC Complaint contended Shkreli had created MSMB Healthcare and Retrophin "so that he could continue trading after MSMB Capital became insolvent and to create an asset that he might be able to use to placate his MSMB Capital investors."

In 2011, Shkreli filed requests with the FDA to reject a new cancer diagnostic device from Navidea Biopharmaceuticals and an inhalable insulin therapy from MannKind Corporation while publicly short-selling both companies' stocks, the values of which dropped after Shkreli's interventions. The companies had difficulty launching the products as a result, although the FDA ultimately approved both.

Shkreli was subpoenaed to appear before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of the U.S. House of Representatives to answer questions about the Daraprim price increase. Shkreli's efforts to quash the subpoena were unsuccessful.

On 4 February 2016, Shkreli appeared before the House committee, along with Nancy Retzlaff, the Chief Commercial Officer of Turing, and Howard B. Schiller, the interim CEO of Valeant.

Accompanied by his attorney Benjamin Brafman, Shkreli invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination in response to every question from committee members except for two: One from Representative Trey Gowdy, to confirm the pronunciation of his last name, and another from Representative Elijah Cummings to affirm he was listening. Shkreli also refused to answer even seemingly trivial questions outside the subject matter of the hearing, including those pertaining to his purchase of a Wu-Tang Clan album. Following Cummings's rebuke of Shkreli, Chairman Jason Chaffetz dismissed Shkreli from the hearing.

In December 2016, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance issued a tax warrant against Shkreli for $1.26 million for unpaid taxes. He made partial payments and the State recovered another $134,500 from the auctioning off of various assets seized from Shkreli; these included an Enigma machine for $65,000, a manuscript signed by Isaac Newton, and letters from Charles Darwin and Ada Lovelace.

In April 2018, New York's attorney general asked Judge Matsumoto for priority on more than $480,000 out of the $7.4 million in assets forfeited to the federal government, arguing that the state had priority over the federal government's claims for Shkreli's forfeited assets.

In April 2018, Shkreli agreed to a Securities and Exchange Commission order banning him from the securities industry in exchange for settlement of the SEC administrative action against him; Shkreli is eligible to apply for readmission to the industry.

In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission and seven states—California, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—filed a civil lawsuit against Shkreli. A seven-day bench trial was held in December 2021. In January 2022, Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a lengthy opinion and order directing Shkreli to return $64.6 million in wrongfully obtained profits (disgorgement); the money is to be distributed to victims nationwide (via the states that were plaintiffs in the case). The court found that Shkreli had violated federal and state law through an anticompetitive scheme to delay "the entry of generic competition for at least eighteen months" and banned Shkreli from the pharmaceutical industry for life. The fine was upheld on appeal by both the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Supreme Court denied to hear his appeal from that decision.

On February 23, 2022, U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York ordered Shkreli to pay a $1.39 million fine for violating securities laws between 2009 and 2014 and banned him from serving as an officer or a director of any publicly traded company for life.

In January 2016, Fortune estimated the then-32-year-old Shkreli's net worth was at least $45 million but later updated its profile to reflect that "[S]ince this article was published the value of Shkreli's E-Trade account had dropped by more than $40 million." Shkreli leveraged a $4 million E-Trade account for his bail.

In June 2017, Reuters reported that Shkreli had reported his net worth at $70 million after being arrested in 2015 and that his attorney Benjamin Brafman, in a hearing before Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, had conceded that his client still owned shares of Turing Pharmaceuticals worth between $30 and $50 million.

In December 2020, Shkreli was in a relationship with Christie Smythe, a former reporter for Bloomberg News who broke the news of Shkreli's arrest in 2015. Smythe described their relationship as being "life partners". In October 2021, Smythe said the two had broken up but remained friends.

In October 2023, Vanity Fair published an article on Madison Campbell, the CEO of Leda Health. In the article, it was revealed that Campbell had been involved in a romantic relationship with Shkreli between February and August 2023. Campbell says the two bonded over being "healthcare pariahs" but chose to keep her relationship with him private due to his reputation. Shkreli denied Vanity Fair's request for comment and blocked the author of the article on Twitter.