Nation Reaches Rare Consensus: Martin Shkreli Getting Arrested Is Good

In a moment of rare national consensus, everyone quietly chuckled this morning when Bloomberg broke the news that Martin Shkreli, the pint-sized pharmaceuticals titan best known for inhumanely jacking up the price of a life-saving drug, has been arrested on suspicion of securities fraud.

Bloomberg reports was arrested this morning by federal agents at his Manhattan home—he lives in Murray Hill; of course he lives in Murray Hill—on charges of illegally using stock from Retrophin Inc., a biotech firm he founded, and using it to pay off other debts.

Retrophin, which also operated on the model of acquiring drugs for rare diseases and then significantly raising their prices, sued Shkreli in August for $65 million, saying he’d used company money to pay off debts related to other hedge funds he ran. The company accused him of improper self-dealing and self-enrichment—or, as the New York Times puts it, “using Retrophin as his own personal piggy bank.” At the time of the suit, Shkreli told Bloomberg the accusation was “baseless and meritless.”

Anyway, here’s the last Twitter conversation he had before his arrest.

Shkreli runs nightly livestreams, which mostly feature him sitting in front of his computer, plunking at his guitar and taking questions from fans. Here’s last night’s, if you’d like to watch a man publicly peruse his OKCupid account while mangling Smashing Pumpkins chords.

The U.S. Attorney and the FBI will be holding a joint press conference at noon to discuss Shkreli’s arrest. They probably don’t find this as funny as we do.

Contact the author at [email protected].
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 67B5 5767 9D6F 652E 8EFD 76F5 3CF0 DAF2 79E5 1FB6