Do you want to know about the notorious Martin Shkreli’s net worth and how he became rich?
This article explains his net worth and how he amassed such wealth through nefarious means.
Martin Shkreli, labeled as the “Most hated man in America” and “Crypto Bro,” is a U.S.-based pharma executive, stock trader, hedge fund manager, and an analyst who co-founded the hedge funds Elea Capital, MSMB Capital Management, and MSMB Healthcare.
He also co-founded and held the CEO position at Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals (currently known as Vyera Pharmaceuticals). He even founded the software startup Gödel Systems and held the position of CEO.
He became noticable when he was criticized for hiking the price of a life-saving AIDS drug, Daraprim, exorbitantly by 5455% from $13.50 to $750 per pill. It coulda have saved patients millions of dollars if he hadn’t hiked it so outrageously.
He got a seven-year prison sentence due to securities fraud in 2018.
However, he was released early in the second half of 2022 as he fulfilled all the criteria for an early release.
According to Yahoo reports, the prosecutors revealed that Martin Shkreli’s net worth was $70 million during the trial.
However, his current net worth is nothing close to that and is most probably $0, as reported by Celebrity Net Worth, as he received a lifelong ban from the pharmaceutical industry and had to return a huge sum of profit he made from hiking the medicine price to patients who suffered because of it.
The federal court ordered him to return $64.6 million to the patients who suffered and were victims of his outrageous price increase of a lifesaving drug, which was used as an antiparasitic. Additionally, he was fined $7.4 million, thus bringing his net worth to zero.
Name | Martin Shkreli |
D.O.B. | March 17, 1983 |
Place of Birth | Brooklyn, New York, USA |
Education |
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Occupation |
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Infamous for |
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Labels Earned | Crypto Bro, Most Hated Man in America |
Net Worth | In 2018 – $70 Million At Present – $0 |
Sued By | FTC and seven states including, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, California, New York, Ohio, and Illinois |
Convictions of Crimes |
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Penalty of Crimes |
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Current Criminal Status | Released early from jail in 2022 |
Martin Shkreli was born to a working-class family in Brooklyn, New York, in 1983 on March 17. His parents were immigrants and were of Albanian descent.
Although his parents were Roman Catholic, Shkreli claimed that he didn’t believe in God, but Christianity did help him as “a guiding post.”
Martin attended Hunter College High School, which many people debate he didn’t complete as he was expelled before his senior year. He then accumulated the necessary credits for a high school diploma from City-As-School High School.
Shkreli’s alma mater was Baruch College, where he got a BBA degree in 2004.
Creamer, Berkowitz, and Company are considered one of the renowned hedge funds in the wall street circuit. Shkreli bagged an internship there at only 17.
Martin had quite a diversified career, from a trader and hedge fund manager to an analyst and a pharmaceutical executive.
While Shkreli was working at Cramer, Berkowitz, and Company, he proposed shorting a biotech firm called Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. They were testing a weight-loss drug at the time.
Well, to everyone’s surprise, the price of the stock of Regeneron did drop, and his employer at the time made huge profits. It also attracted a lot of eyeballs, and SEC even investigated him.
SEC wanted to find out how Martin knew about the price drop. He was investigated for insider trading or was involved with any other wrongdoing, but nothing was found then.
After working for Kramer’s fund for four years, he worked a couple of years at Intrepid Capital Management and UBS Wealth Management as a financial analyst.
After his stint for two years at two large-scale investment firms, Shkreli founded his first company Elea Capital Management in 2006. In 2007, Shkreli’s firm wanted to bet on the falling prices of a stock and made a “Put Option Transaction.” However, contrary to his prediction, the stock price rose, and he could not cover his losses.
Lehman Brothers ultimately sued him in New York Court. Lehman Brothers won a $2.3 million judgment against Elea. However, they collapsed in the 2008 banking fiasco before they could collect the money.
Shkreli didn’t learn from his mistake as he had already tasted the blood of extreme wealth, but he didn’t realize that he was hurting the firm and himself by doing this.
In 2009 Shkreli founded MSMB Capital with his childhood friend Marek Biestek. They were fundamentally short sellers of biopharmaceutical companies. They would often take the rogue path of price manipulation by bad-mouthing the companies about their faults in different chat rooms after they had shorted them.
Following MSMB’s shorting mentality, they did a naked short sell of $32 million worth of shares of a biotech company called Orexigen Therapeutics after their price declined due to disapproval by USFDA. But the prices recovered, and they made a huge loss. The account held by Merrill Lynch lost $7 million, and MSMB was practically decimated.
Post Elea and MSMB, the controversial figure, Shkreli founded MSMB Healthcare and Retrophin to continue trading and make more biotech investments, as the other companies were insolvent. He wanted to please his MSMB capital investors by recovering funds through these two new entities.
Retrophin was founded by Shkreli in 2011 as a subsidiary of the MSMB, focusing on biotechnology and creating a remedy for rare diseases.
Under his guidance, his employees created fake accounts on Twitter and joked about biotech stocks, and encouraged others to short them. It continued till 2014 when the board replaced him with Stephen Aselage.
Post his departure, Retrophin sued him on multiple charges. He was charged that he didn’t perform his loyal duty as the founder, misused company funds, had various irregularities regarding trading, and violated securities rules. Finally, he was also charged with harassing a former MSMB employee.
Despite so many failed ventures and a barrage of lawsuits, Martin Shkreli started another venture called Turing Pharmaceuticals in 2015. He launched the pharmaceutical company with three drugs, ketamine, oxytocin, and Vecamyl, by acquiring them from Retrophin.
He founded Turing intending to obtain out-of-patent medicine licenses and market them at high prices through a closed distribution model.
Following this strategy, Shkreli acquired Daraprim from Impax Laboratories for $55 million. The drug was used as an anti-parasitic to treat AIDS-related and AIDS-unrelated toxoplasmosis.
The deal between the parties was that Impax would remove the regular supply from the wholesale market. It was done to limit the supply so that Turing could increase the drug’s price.
Turing increased the price of one dose by an unimaginable factor of 56 from $13.50 to $750. Various medical bodies and the then-presidential candidates heavily criticized the price hike.
In reply to the tremendous pressure and widespread outrage from the public, Shkreli announced that he would reduce the price but ultimately fell short of his promise and decided not to decrease the price.
He also hired lobbyists to run a PR campaign and convince people behind his pricing rationale.
However, in October 2015, L Baum, C.E.O. of Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, launched an alternative to Daraprim called Leucovorin at only $1 a pill and sold a 100-count bottle for $99.
In November 2015, Turing announced a 50% discount for bulk orders at the hospital. Still, many specialists, including Tim Horn of the Treatment Action Group, disagreed with this offer as the patients needed to use the medicines long past their treatment at hospitals.
As Martin Shkreli was in prison, Turing was renamed Phoenixus to distance themselves from Shkreli.
KaloBios Pharmaceuticals was a biopharma company that was acquired by a group led by Shkreli in 2015, and he was also named the CEO. However, in 2015 post his arrest, he was removed from the role of CEO, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
After a series of drug companies, drug company executive Shkreli ventured into software development and founded Gödel Systems in 2016 to provide data, workflow, and communications solutions for different professionals from law and finance. Ralph Holzmann was appointed the CTO of the company.
After Martin Shkreli’s release from prison, he founded yet another software web with three projects called Druglike, which would focus on discovering early stage pharma drugs.
Following his nature, Martin started a cryptocurrency project called Martin Shkreli Inu Coin. After the launch in August 2022, the token lost 90% of its value after a wallet allegedly belonging to Martin Shkreli dumped its massive holding, destroying its value.
As per Bloomberg News, when the account holder was asked about the sudden dumping of 160 billion Martin Shkreli Inu Coins, he said he was hacked.
Martin Shkreli was arrested on December 17, 2015, by the FBI. The New York District Court indicted him on charges of securities fraud and also on charges of conspiracy to commit fraud.
US Attorney Robert Capers commented that Shkreli was running the companies like Ponzi-like schemes where he founded new companies to pay off defrauded investors from the previous ones.
Shkreli tried to fight against these charges vehemently by tactfully using his social presence and criticism of the federal prosecutors.
However, on August 4, 2017, Shkreli was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment after being found guilty of two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud. He was found not guilty on five counts of criminal charges.
To everybody’s surprise, Shkreli was happy with the judgment and described the ordeal as a “witch hunt of epic proportions” against him.
A thing to be noticed is that the judge revoked his bail after he put a bounty on Hillary Clinton’s hair for $5000.
In March 2018, Martin was ordered by the court to forfeit his assets worth $7.4 million. In April 2018, he was ordered to pay restitution of $388,000.
The United States Govt. even sanctioned and sold off his $2 million Wu-Tang Clan album to an anonymous buyer and other belongings.
Shkreli asked for a compassionate release but was denied as he didn’t meet the criteria in April 2022.
Shkreli was released early after a decision in May 2022 as he completed all the programs required for his prison sentence to be shortened. He was moved to Halfway House, where he remained till September 2022, when he was released.
Shkreli donated $1 million to Hunter College High School in 2015.
It is by far the largest donation of its kind in its history.
He also dated Christie Smythe, the same Bloomberg News reporter who broke the news of his arrest in 2015. However, the two broke up in 2021.
The most frequently asked questions are as follows:
According to the New York Tax Delinquents list, Martin Shkreli owes around $1.6 million in income taxes. Shkreli was released in 2022 after serving time for securities fraud charges.
Martin Shkreli, aka Pharma Bro, made at least $70 million as he was fined $7.4 million and was made to return a profit of $64.6 million to the patients to whom he sold Daraprim at an exorbitantly high price.
Vyera Pharmaceuticals, previously known as Turing Pharmaceuticals, owns Daraprim. Turing was heavily criticized after their then CEO, Shkreli, increased the price of this important life-saving antiparasitic drug by 5455% from $13.50 to $750.
Although Martin Shkreli’s net worth was $70 million, he could not use it and ultimately did prison time and was labeled as “The Most Hated Man in America.”
He perfectly exemplifies what happens when you don’t learn from your mistakes. Not only did he go to prison, but he received a lot of public scorn and became a hated person in the entire country.
It is a stern reminder that we should always be wary of our actions. If we make a mistake, we should accept it, analyze it, and act upon it to rectify it so that it is not repeated in the future.
Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial advice. The author’s opinions are their own and should not be taken as a recommendation to invest in any particular product or service. It is strongly advised that you consult a financial advisor before making investment decisions. Investing always carries risk, and it is up to each individual to consider their options and make informed choices carefully.
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