Martin Shkreli

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

The New York Times, 20 Sept. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/business/a-huge-overnight-increase-in-a-drugs-price-raises-protests.html#:~:text=The%20drug%2C%20called%20Daraprim%2C%20was,hundreds%20of%20thousands%20of%20dollars. 11. Copeland, Rob, et al. “Turing Pharmaceuticals Replaces Martin Shkreli as CEO.” The Wall Street Journal, 19 Dec. 2015, www.wsj.com/articles/turing-pharmaceuticals-close-to-replacing-martin-shkreli-as-ceo-1450454741. 12. Farberov, Snejana. “Martin Shkreli Hurls Sexist Comment at Taylor Swift in HipHopDx Interview.” Daily Mail Online, 16 Dec. 2015, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3363202/Martin-Shkreli-hurls-sexist-comment-Taylor-Swift-saying-play-2million-Wu-Tang-Clan-album-exchange-sexual-favor.html. 13. “Martin Shkreli Headed to Jail after Bail Revoked over Hillary Clinton Post.” The Guardian, 13 Sept. 2017, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/13/martin-shkreli-jail-securities-fraud-hillary-clinton. 14.

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The Guardian, 13 Sept. 2017, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/13/martin-shkreli-jail-securities-fraud-hillary-clinton. 14. Mangan, Dan. “‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli Found Guilty of 3 of 8 Charges, Including Securities Fraud.” CNBC, 4 Aug. 2017, www.cnbc.com/2017/08/04/pharma-bro-martin-shkreli-convicted-in-federal-fraud-case.html#:~:text=Biotech%20and%20Pharma-,’Pharma%20bro’%20Martin%20Shkreli%20found%20guilty%20of%203%20of,8%20charges%2C%20including%20securities%20fraud&text=Martin%20Shkreli%20was%20accused%20of,years%20in%20prison%20when%20sentenced. CHAPTER 8 1. al-Qadi, Fadi. “Do Not Forget the Jailed Saudi Women’s Rights Activists.”

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He laughed and said, “Look, man, this is Wall Street.” It was as though he were trying to act out his childhood dream of starring in his favorite movie. Maybe that was his sin. Martin Shkreli just wanted to be the Wolf of Wall Street. He didn’t just want to make money; he wanted everyone to know he cared about nothing else. So, ironically, he didn’t actually care only about money—he cared even more about making sure everyone knew that. Martin Shkreli didn’t dream of being rich; he dreamed of being a rich asshole. And being famous for it. I watched from afar as he became an industry pariah for acquiring Daraprim, a medication to treat a rare condition in certain HIV patients, and jacking the price over 5,000 percent from $13.50 to $750 per pill.10 He became the poster boy for the greed of the pharmaceutical industry.

Mending the Net: Toward Universal Basic Incomes
by Chris Oestereich
Published 20 Oct 2016

[18] Belik, V, “A Town Without Poverty?” http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100. [19] Lorenzetti, L, 2015, “Here’s why Turing Pharmaceuticals says 5,000% price bump is necessary,” http://fortune.com/2015/09/21/turing-pharmaceuticals-martin-shkreli-response/, Associated Press, 2016, “Turing execs warned Martin Shkreli against price hike, lawyer says,” https://www.statnews.com/2016/03/17/martin-shkreli-turing-daraprim/. [20] Richardson Voyles, L, 2016, “The EpiPen boss tried to defend price hikes to Congress. No one bought it,” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/22/epipen-maylan-ceo-defend-price-hikes-congress-heather-bresch.

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return
by Mihir Desai
Published 22 May 2017

New York: Library of America, 1999. The Joyce quote is from Orwin, Donna Tussing. The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. For Martin Shkreli, I drew on Goldman, David. “Who Is Martin Shkreli? A Timeline.” CNN Money, December 18, 2015. http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/18/news/companies/martin-shkreli/; McLean, Bethany. “Everything You Know About Martin Shkreli Is Wrong—or Is It?” Vanity Fair, February 2016; and Sanneh, Kelefa. “Everyone Hates Martin Shkreli. Everyone Is Missing the Point.” New Yorker, February 5, 2016. Public opinion about finance is summarized in Owens, L. A. “The Polls—Trends: Confidence in Banks, Financial Institutions, and Wall Street, 1971–2011.”

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More than half of Americans are now convinced that Wall Street does more harm than good for the economy. And we shouldn’t be surprised by the miserable reputation of finance. As both Mark Twain and Philip Roth have noted, reality is providing even more fantastic characters than can be dreamt up by a fiction writer. The latest and most perfected version of the finance archetype is the real-life Martin Shkreli. A son of Albanian immigrants, he launched a hedge fund, was indicted for securities fraud, ran a pharmaceutical company, raised prices on a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent, pled the Fifth Amendment when called to testify before Congress, purchased a onetime edition of a Wu-Tang Clan album for millions (and won’t share it), and livestreamed his life, which included flirting with underage girls, all by the age of thirty-three.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business
by Alan Murray
Published 15 Dec 2022

Leadership Next interview, Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt with Joe Ucuzoglu. CHAPTER 4: THE COVID-19 REDEMPTION 1. Justin McCarthy. “Big Pharma Sinks to the Bottom of U.S. Industry Rankings.” Gallup, September 3, 2019. 2. “Martin Shkreli, ‘Most Hated Man in America,’ Arrested for Fraud.” CBC, December 17, 2015; Phil McCausland. “Fraud Trial for Martin Shkreli, ‘Most Hated Man in America,’ Begins Monday.” NBC News, June 25, 2017. 3. Stephanie Clifford. “Wanting Martin Shkreli to Stop Talking, Prosecutors Seek Judge’s Help.” New York Times, July 4, 2017. 4. Leadership Next interview, Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt with Albert Bourla. 5. Leadership Next interview, Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt with Noubar Afeyan. 6.

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None of them are things a responsible CEO, with a focus on the long term, could safely ignore. CHAPTER 4 THE COVID-19 REDEMPTION In 2019, when Gallup polled Americans about which industries they liked least, the pharmaceutical industry won the prize.1 The reason wasn’t hard to fathom. Persistent publicity over pricing scandals—Martin Shkreli and Valeant took top honors there—as well as the pill-pushing behind the opioid scandal, had poisoned the industry in the public mind. Capturing the public imagination (and not in a good way) a few years before the pandemic was the story of Shkreli, a hedge fund manager and CEO of two fledgling pharmaceutical companies, Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals.

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As it would turn out, the vaccine delivery began in December. Bourla admitted to me that they were partially to blame for public lack of trust. “For years the CEOs of Pfizer were speaking of how much money we made from Lipitor instead of pointing out how many hundreds of millions of lives were saved by Lipitor. We did it to ourselves. You have the Martin Shkreli’s, but also the philosophy of just jacking up prices as much as you can and cutting the research. It’s just the exact opposite of what we’re talking about. And now, you really do see a scramble. They’re all saying, ‘Wow, this is our chance to redeem ourselves, to prove that we have real value to society.’”

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
by Rebecca Henderson
Published 27 Apr 2020

Andrew Pollack, “Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight,” New York Times, Sept. 20, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/business/a-huge-overnight-increase-in-a-drugs-price-raises-protests.html. 16. Kate Gibson, “Martin Shkreli: I Should’ve ‘Raised Prices Higher,’” CBS News, CBS Interactive, Dec. 4, 2015, www.cbsnews.com/news/martin-shkreli-i-shouldve-raised-prices-higher/. 17. Stephanie Clifford, “Martin Shkreli Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison for Fraud,” New York Times, Mar. 9, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/business/martin-shkreli-sentenced.html. 18. Gretchen Morgenson, “Defiant, Generic Drug Maker Continues to Raise Prices,” New York Times, Apr. 14, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/business/lannett-drug-price-hike-bedrosian.html. 19.

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In September 2015, Turing, a small start-up with only two products, announced that it was raising the price of the generic drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 a tablet—an approximately 5,000 percent increase. Daraprim was widely used to treat complications from AIDS. It cost approximately $1 per pill to produce and had no competition.15 Anyone wanting to buy Daraprim had to buy it from Turing. The move unleashed a media storm. Martin Shkreli, Turing’s CEO, was vilified in the press and accosted in public. But he was unrepentant. Asked if he would do anything differently, he replied: I probably would have raised prices higher.… I could have raised it higher and made more profits for our shareholders. Which is my primary duty.… No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it, but this is a capitalist society, capitalist system and capitalist rules, and my investors expect me to maximize profits, not to minimize them, or go half, or go 70 percent, but to go to 100 percent of the profit curve that we’re all taught in MBA class.16 It’s tempting to believe that Shkreli is an outlier.

Having and Being Had
by Eula Biss
Published 15 Jan 2020

Yes, she didn’t publish. But publication is not where the pleasure is in writing. David responds with a quote from Dickinson, How public – like a Frog. What the Nazis did, David says, hoarding art for its monetary value, is like what the art market is doing now. I just read an article, I say, about Martin Shkreli, who bought the rights to a Wu-Tang Clan album that nobody has ever heard. Now the feds have the album, because Shkreli was convicted of defrauding investors. He also inflated the price of a drug used by AIDS patients by 5,500 percent, but that wasn’t a crime. The Wu-Tang Clan didn’t intend to entangle themselves with a free-market capitalist who pushed the profit margin on medicine, but they did want to make a high-end collector’s item.

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Emily Dickinson: Critical Assessments, volume 2, edited by Graham Clarke. Helm Information, 2002. “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (260), Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, edited by R. W. Franklin. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. “Repulsed by Pharma-Bro Martin Shkreli? Maybe You Also Hate Capitalism,” Jesse Myerson. In These Times, February 22, 2016. Of Shkreli’s purchase of the Wu-Tang album, Myerson writes, “The situation was obviously unique in its particulars, but one essential element of it is highly precedented, even endemic to American ‘racial capitalism’: cultural appropriation.”

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World
by Dambisa Moyo
Published 3 May 2021

“Enron’s Collapse: The Overview; Enron Corp. Files Largest U.S. Claim for Bankruptcy.” New York Times, December 3, 2001. www.nytimes.com/2001/12/03/business/enron-s-collapse-the-overview-enron-corp-files-largest-us-claim-for-bankruptcy.html. Owles, Eric. “The Making of Martin Shkreli as ‘Pharma Bro.’” DealBook (blog). New York Times, June 22, 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/business/dealbook/martin-shkreli-pharma-bro-drug-prices.html. Oxfam. “The Robin Hood Tax: The Time Is Now.” News release, June 19, 2011. www.oxfam.de/sites/default/files/webfm/ftt_oxfam_media_brief_final_english_version_20110617.pdf. Paradigm for Parity. “The 5-Point Action Plan.” www.paradigm4parity.com/solution.

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
by Tim Wu
Published 14 Jun 2018

Meanwhile, within the United States, enforcement agencies allowed passage of a new and disturbing kind of drug acquisition: the sale of a drug to a firm whose immediate design was to take full advantage of the monopoly pricing potential, by raising prices by at least 1,000 percent and sometimes as much as 6,000 percent. The most famous example was that of an opportunistic young man named Martin Shkreli who managed to acquire the facilities for the production of a rare drug named Daraprim, and immediately increased the price from $13.50 a pill to $750. But that was just one of many similar transactions—none of which were challenged—and indeed the price of Daraprim remains at $750. • Ticketmaster, the nation’s dominant seller of tickets to live events, was allowed to merge with LiveNation, the nation’s near-monopoly promoter of events.

January Fifteenth
by Rachel Swirsky
Published 13 Jun 2022

“—and since DNA degrades so fast, Jurassic Park isn’t even possible—” “—so the hard part was finding someone who would sell me that much coal—” “—since that girl, what’s her name, Eve, won with a piss joke, I started wondering what I could do with crap—” “—but what’ll you do if you actually end up in Congress?” “I’ll concede to the other guy—” “—I won’t be destroying anything. The painting’s just fine where it is, where no one will lay eyes on it until America’s some crap you learn about in Ancient Civ.” “The full Martin Shkreli.” “Who? Why do you always bring up random shit, Freddie?” “—and I already sent it all to research in astrology. Bam. Done.” “Ha. I should have sent mine to the Catholic Church.” “It’s a rich area. I heard people arguing about whether to donate to the Flat Earthers or Victim Nation—” “—only four performances, and I bought them all out—” “—plans to build a beach house in New Orleans—” “—who’s going to decide what’s a waste or not?

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World
by Neil Gibb
Published 15 Feb 2018

For Rapha and its fans, the game is the glory and suffering of road cycling. With AA it is showing that alcoholics who have been previously written off by everyone else can get and stay sober. What they all have in common is that their primary purpose is the fulfilment of a social mission. A big why. They are out to prove a point. In 2011, Martin Shkreli, a 28-year-old New Yorker who had made a fortune as a hedge fund manager, bought a pharmaceutical company called Retrophin. The company owned the rights to Thiola, a drug used by 20,000 patients in the United States to treat rare and incurable kidney diseases. One of the first things Shkreli did was bump up the price of Thiola from $2 to $42 – his instinct as a hedge fund manager was to look at how to maximise the return on his investment.

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees
by Ben Mezrich
Published 6 Sep 2021

Although Rogozinski had founded the site, he had eventually ended up getting removed from the very board he’d created when accusations surfaced—which he disputed—that he was trying to “monetize the sub” for personal gain. In his place, a variety of moderators had attempted to keep order over the years—a constant task, in the Wild West of one of the few truly anonymous corners of the Web. When Kim had first stumbled onto the site, the moderator at the time had actually been Martin Shkreli—a hedge fund iconoclast, known in the media as the “Pharma Bro,” who was pilloried for raising drug prices to obscene levels, purely for profit, and who eventually ended up in prison for securities fraud. Shkreli was just the sort of brazen, outspoken personality Kim found herself gravitating toward; even if she didn’t respect what he stood for, she was intrigued by his wild, often unhinged personality.

How to Do Nothing
by Jenny Odell
Published 8 Apr 2019

Tiger Sun, “Duck Syndrome and a Culture of Misery,” Stanford Daily, January 31, 2018: https://www.stanforddaily.com/2018/01/31/duck-syndrome-and-a-culture-of-misery/. 55. Paris Martineau, “The Future of College Is Facebook Meme Groups,” New York Magazine, July 10, 2017: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/martin-shkreli-teens-and-college-facebook-meme-groups.html. 56. Brandon Walker, “Non CS reaccs only,” Facebook post in Stanford Memes for Edgy Trees, July 2, 2018: https://www.facebook.com/groups/StanfordMemes/permalink/2299623930064291/. 57. Martin Altenburg, “Oldie but a goodie,” Facebook post in Stanford Memes for Edgy Trees, August 28, 2018: https://www.facebook.com/groups/StanfordMemes/permalink/2405197476173602/. 58.

The Finance Book: Understand the Numbers Even if You're Not a Finance Professional
by Stuart Warner and Si Hussain
Published 20 Apr 2017

Profitable pricing can be perfectly ethical in a competitive market where customers have choice. However, pricing can be contentious in monopoly situations if the monopolist uses its market power to set high prices and earn excessive profits. For example, Turing Pharmaceuticals and its former CEO Martin Shkreli, received widespread criticism for raising the price of the drug ‘Daraprim’ by over 5,000 % in 2015. Price skimming ‘Price skimming’ is a strategy used for new products or services which are highly desirable, differentiated from the competition and usually high quality, for example the latest smart phone or accessory.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

For an hour, in a conference room surrounded by breath-taking views of the Manhattan skyline, we caught him up on everything that had happened: the co-founder breakup, the death of our business model, our plans to pivot into an automation company under the name “Turing Labs” (later abandoned on account of its association with Martin Shkreli’s price-gouging pharmaceutical company2). He was alternatingly sympathetic and encouraging, and as we left, I felt a little lighter, a little more optimistic. After all, this startup had once been merely an idea, and now they were a wildly promising marketing technology company with panoramic Manhattan views and millions of dollars in funding.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone
Published 18 Feb 2020

Take the impact of Moore’s Law: If the price of a personal computer stays the same but next year’s model runs four times faster, processes twice as quickly, and has three times the memory, the labor productivity number would stay the same, even though the customer is getting a lot more for the dollar he or she spends. There are other problems with this metric as well. Take the notorious case of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Martin Shkreli, the founder of Turing, purchased the U.S. marketing rights to the drug Daraprim (pyrimethamine) in 2015. This sixty-year-old drug is critical for the treatment of toxoplasmosis. Turing raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750—more than a 5,000 percent increase. The result was a giant scandal, Congressional hearings, and more.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
Published 15 Mar 2016

On the retailer’s dispute with Hachette, see David Streitfeld, “Literary Lions Unite in Protest Over Amazon’s E-Book Tactics,” New York Times, September 29, 2014. On Google and the FTC, see Brody Mullins, “Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2015. 18. Pharma executives often use innovation to justify their pricing decisions. Consider the innovation remarks of Martin Shkreli, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, a company that in 2015 dramatically raised the price of an old drug it had acquired. Asked Shkreli of Bernie Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate who had criticized him, “Is he willing to sort of accept that there is a tradeoff, that to take risks for innovation, companies have to invest lots of money and they need some kind of return for that, and what does he think that should look like?”

Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter
by Dr. Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler
Published 7 Nov 2017

Well, annoying our spouse with pettiness has its own drawbacks, so we’ll let everyone choose the right balance between showing effort and annoying their significant other, but at least take this as some food for thought. Also, remember: Divorce attorneys are expensive. They charge by the hour, and they don’t show any of their effort. FAIR WELL People always demand what’s “fair.” In negotiations, sales, marriage, and life. That’s not bad. Fairness is a good thing. When in 2015 Martin Shkreli suddenly raised the price of the lifesaving drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750—that’s 5,555 percent—right after he acquired the company that made it, people were outraged. That was seen as blatantly unfair, and while Daraprim remains overpriced and Shkreli remains an [expletive deleted], it has brought long-overdue attention to fairness in drug pricing.

Everything's Trash, but It's Okay
by Phoebe Robinson
Published 15 Oct 2018

I’ve been there, done all of that, and most likely so have you. In fact, so have many Americans, as we are quick to bust out the case at the first sign of discomfort. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes the complaints are necessary. Like in 2015, when now-disgraced founder and former chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals Martin Shkreli raised the price of the drug Daraprim, an antiparasitic commonly used to treat HIV patients, from $13.50 to $750.00 a tablet. Naturally, this sent shock waves across the country, people were rightfully outraged, a litany of think pieces were written, and months later, Turing lowered the cost to $375 for some hospitals, hailing this 50 percent price decrease a “victory.”

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

“You have these platforms designed by people who found success at a very young age and had all their precepts verified and there’s kind of a casualness and playfulness to it,” says Margaret O’Mara, professor of history at the University of Washington and author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.[27] Uniquely, Reddit tries to control content through human and also sometimes automated moderators. One of the early moderators of WallStreetBets was Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical executive who infamously raised the price of an AIDS drug more than fiftyfold and was sentenced to prison for an unrelated securities fraud. Though not part of his conviction, Shkreli was the architect of a short squeeze smaller but wilder than those affecting the meme stocks when he led a group that bought up most of the worthless shares of the pharmaceutical company KaloBios in 2015, briefly sending its shares up by 10,000 percent.

Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation
by Sebastien Page
Published 4 Nov 2020

First, on September 21, Hillary Clinton tweeted that she would unveil a plan to curtail “price gouging” by pharmaceutical companies.7 (The day before, the New York Times had published an article on how Turing Pharmaceuticals had just increased the price of a lifesaving drug from $13.50 to $750.00.8 The media nicknamed Martin Shkreli, Turing’s young and brash CEO, the “pharma bro.”) Second, on September 28, Democrats in the US House of Representatives asked to subpoena Valeant Pharmaceuticals for documents on drug price increases.9 XLV volume on that day reached an all-time high. Both events threatened to put pressure on pharmaceuticals-sector revenues, but not necessarily those of other healthcare stocks.

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023

Many people had something to answer for. Whether any accountability would come was an open question. Lest we mistakenly believe Bankman-Fried was the sole bad actor in crypto, our rogues’ gallery of con men once again sprang to life. During a recording of the UpOnly crypto podcast on November 8, Martin Shkreli—the pharma bro who epitomized corporate greed and went to jail for securities fraud—advised Do Kwon, the fugitive Terra founder, to look on the bright side of life: “Jail is not that bad,” Shkreli said. Around the same time, the 3AC guys beamed in from undisclosed locations to weigh in on the con, being as they were experts in the field.

Owning the Sun
by Alexander Zaitchik
Published 7 Jan 2022

It is the story of how monopoly medicine came to be, from the earliest debates over the morality and practical value of granting monopolies on lifesaving inventions, to the globalization of this right by Washington on a basis of forced consent. It is the long prequel to our current age of crowdsourced online medical fundraisers; of hedge funds and Martin Shkreli getting a say in who lives and for how long; of the minting of biotech billionaires during a pandemic while vaccine factories sit idle; and of the lobbying, propaganda, and marketing machines that protect the system from the steaming volcano of a public that understands it to be fundamentally corrupt and unjust.

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom
by Katherine Eban
Published 13 May 2019

And owing to the company’s 2014 decision to incorporate in Ireland to lower its taxes, she and the other executives had made a great deal more: in 2014, both she and Malik earned over $25 million each in total compensation. By then, the EpiPen provided roughly 10 percent of the company’s revenue. Overnight, Bresch became the face of pharmaceutical greed. She was compared in the media to Martin Shkreli, the former hedge-fund manager turned Big Pharma CEO who’d raised the price of a decades-old drug to treat AIDS infections by 5,000 percent. As a wave of public condemnation washed over Bresch, she did herself few favors. In a disastrous CNBC interview, she declared of the price hikes, “No one’s more frustrated than me.”

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Published 19 Jul 2021

Hoping to build new apartments on vacant land in the complex, Neumann put down a $20 million deposit, which WeWork lost when it later backed out of the deal. Sometimes the pursuits were even more peripheral. Gross and Neumann briefly became obsessed with buying a coveted Wu Tang Clan rap album of which only a single copy was made. The disgraced pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli had paid $2 million for it, but it was seized by the federal government after he went to prison. Gross and Neumann sent internal emails to other members of the staff to see how they could buy it, but the effort never went anywhere. More troubling were Neumann’s deals with his friends. On at least two occasions, he used SoftBank’s money to invest in companies with little clear connection to WeWork other than that they were run by his friends: Ashton Kutcher and Laird Hamilton, a star of the 1990s pro-surfing scene.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

He posted frequent long clips on major news items and internet arcana, riffing on them as a humorist just asking questions. He borrowed Stefan Molyneux’s tactic of promising to share secret knowledge the mainstream media obscured. (Watson’s videos offered “the truth about” rape culture, ISIS, Ebola, and #Gamergate.) His Clinton video was comically sourced: one expert he cited was “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, who was then being indicted for securities fraud. But the video took off, jumping to the top of Reddit’s page devoted to Trump. The Drudge Report and the National Enquirer, ferocious Trump surrogates, introduced more spurious coverage of Clinton’s health; Fox News’s Sean Hannity devoted multiple nights of his show to the issue.