“If you’re afraid of who you are, that’s worse than prison,” says Martin Shkreli.
He should know. The infamous “Pharma Bro” spent four and a half years in federal penitentiaries. Now he’s free—and sitting next to me at a bar in Midtown, telling me that the most important thing is to “Be honest. Be yourself.”
His is an only-in-New-York type of story. He has made and lost fortunes, as well as his good name, mostly within the five boroughs. Born in Brooklyn to working-class, immigrant parents, who came here from Albania, he managed to get into one of Manhattan’s most selective public schools. When he was still a teenager, he landed an internship with Jim Cramer on Wall Street. Then he went to Baruch College, before starting his own hedge fund, and then a drug company called Retrophin, and becoming rich and moving into a penthouse in Midtown. He’s started or been heavily involved in at least three more drug companies since.
He first became famous—or, more accurately, infamous—in 2015, when his company Turing acquired the license for Daraprim, a drug that’s used to treat toxoplasmosis in HIV-positive patients, and immediately pumped up the price from $13.50 per pill to $750. The BBC dubbed him “the most hated man in America,” and he became a symbol of everything wrong with healthcare, capitalism, and any industry that’s ever had “bros.”
Now, the Pharma Bro has become a Pharma Man—he’s 42 now, and a dad. How does he answer his critics? “You’re mad I raised the price of a drug?” he says. “Help me understand, like, what should the drug cost?” The implied answer is: Whatever people will pay for it. His one “sacred” rule in business is this: “The firms set the price, whether you love it or hate it, that’s it.”
