The name of former hedge-fund manager Martin Shkreli shot to notoriety last year when the pharmaceutical company he co-founded, Turing Pharmaceuticals, jacked up prices of Daraprim, a 62-year-old antiparasitic drug now used by patients with weakened immune systems, by over 5,000%.
While Turing reduced the drug’s price in the wake of the outrage, the so-called Pharma Bro has stayed in the public eye ever since. From getting arrested for securities fraud tied to another pharma firm he’d run to splurging $2 million to snap up the only copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin rap album, he has become a lightning rod on social media.
So, when news came from Australia that some students in a Sydney high school had replicated Daraprim at roughly $2 a dose, snarky comments naturally flooded in (where else?) on Twitter. He responded to the students and their feat in a 55-second video on YouTube.
In classic, restrained Shkreli style, he also showed his critics how he was taking the reports in stride.
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He had no issues with Twitter users’ schadenfreude, completely.
Twitter even curated a Moments post to document Shrkeli’s tweets, which the pharma entrepreneur gladly shared with everyone else.
The series of reactions acquired a decidedly — shall we say, Breaking Bad? — taste toward the end.
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