You may remember professional (and hobbyist) jerkwad Martin Shkreli as the pharmaceutical CEO who hiked the price of an AIDS drug 5,500%. You may also remember him for the recent announcement that he’d purchased Wu-Tang Clan’s single-copy album. From this point on, however, you will remember him as the jerk who did that stuff and then got arrested by the FBI.
For once, everyone (or almost everyone) is in agreement: the schadenfreude at Shkreli’s arrest is sweet. The jerk-burger was arrested this morning in New York City on suspicion of securities fraud related to Retrophin Inc., a biotech company he started in 2011. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to arrest someone on several counts of being a raging asshole whose only regret is that he didn’t raise the price of a life-saving drug higher. “My investors expect me to maximize profits,” Bloomberg Business reports that Shkreli said at a Forbes summit over the summer.
Still, even in defeat, Shkreli is crushing our dreams one last time: Any and all heists in the works to steal Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album back with Bill Murray will now be significantly less satisfying with their intended target behind bars. (If he gets behind bars. First he has to be proven guilty, and then he has to be denied his rich white dude get out of jail free card.) True, the clause in the album’s sale contract stipulating the album could be stolen back by a group of musical artists and a famous actor was a hoax, but with the album in Shkreli’s hands, I think we all could’ve agreed to uphold it anyway.
Or maybe, since Shkreli is likely to make flagrant use of the aforementioned get out of jail free card, we could get the judge to at least sentence him to making that a reality. The world deserves at least that satisfaction.
(via Bloomberg Business, image via Fox)
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