Some people just have a knack, even a skill, for placing themselves at the center of obnoxious public business deals.
But few have proved as adroit at the practice as Martin Shkreli.
Remember him? Shkreli’s first foray into public notice came in 2015, when he jacked up the price of a 60-year-old drug to a point where it was virtually out of reach of patients for whom it was a lifesaving treatment.
At this moment, he is back in the spotlight for claiming that he launched a crypto token dubbed DJT on behalf of Donald Trump’s son Barron. More on that in a moment.
To begin at or near the beginning, in 2015, Shkreli’s company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, acquired the rights to a drug named Daraprim.
The drug was a crucial treatment for the parasite-borne disease toxoplasmosis, which in its worst manifestations can cause blindness, neurological problems or death. The disease remedy is a six-week, two-pill-a-day course of Daraprim; at the standard price of $13.50 per pill, that brought the cost of a full course of treatment to about $1,130.
Shkreli raised the price of Daraprim to $750 per pill, or $63,000. For those needing more protracted treatment such as HIV patients, the cost could exceed $630,000.
That made Shkreli the poster boy for the dysfunction in America’s pharmaceutical market, especially since Turing hadn’t developed Daraprim itself; the drug had been on the market since 1953. He seemed to bask in his renown, turning in a smirking performance before a congressional committee in 2016 that got him labeled the “pharma bro” in the popular press.
Shkreli kept making news. In 2015 he had been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors with fraud, based on allegations that he had cheated investors in two hedge funds he founded. A federal court jury convicted him on three felony counts in 2017. A federal judge sentenced him to seven years in prison; he was released in 2022.
Also in 2022, the Federal Trade Commission banned Shkreli for life from participating in the pharmaceutical industry, due to his actions involving Daraprim.
That brings us up to date, more or less. At this moment, Shkreli is embroiled in two controversies.
We’ll start with the Barron Trump affair. About a week ago, a crypto blogger stated on X (formerly Twitter) that Donald Trump “is launching an official token” dubbed DJT, Trump’s initials, on the Solana trading platform. “Barron spearheading,” he wrote.
Unlikely as that might sound, it fit into what appears to be a trend of third parties trying to associate Barron, 18, with Trumpian enterprises. In May, the Florida Republican Party selected him as a delegate to the Republican National Convention.
Barron’s mother, Melania, put the kibosh on that, stating that Barron couldn’t attend due to “prior commitments” — even though the selection had been endorsed by Donald Trump.
The tweet referring to DJT sent the new token soaring in the crypto market from a price of less than a penny to nearly three cents on June 17 and 18. On Tuesday it was trading between about 1.6 cents and 1.8 cents.
The initial tweet launched a frenzied effort among crypto followers to find out who really was behind DJT. On June 18 the crypto data firm Arkham Intelligence offered a $150,000 “bounty” to anyone who could identify the real creator of DJT. A day later it awarded the prize to ZachXBT, a self-identified “detective” on X, who established to Arkham’s satisfaction that it was Shkreli.
Since then, Shkreli has offered to produce evidence that he and Barron collaborated on the launch, including logs of Zoom meetings in which he and someone identified as “bt” participated.
Shkreli wouldn’t comment to me on the record. Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump presidential campaign replied to my queries about whether Barron worked with or even knew Shkreli or was involved with the coin.
During a lengthy webcast June 19 on the Spaces live-audio feature of X, however, Shkreli maintained that he had been brought together with Barron by one of Barron’s high school friends and that the coin was developed and launched at Barron’s initiative, and that Barron was determined to launch a Trump coin before Donald Trump Jr., whom he supposedly detests.
“I was approached, not the other way around,” Shkreli said. “Barron gave me the order to launch the coin…. He was adamant that Don Jr. was going to launch a coin.”
Shkreli said that Barron was also worried that Trump’s presidential campaign would launch its own token. “We kept this from the campaign. We don’t trust the campaign. We don’t like the campaign people — I viewed them and Barron viewed them as bloodsuckers, as political consultants who know nothing and are just trying to drain as much money as they can out of the situation.”
He said Barron pulled out of the deal after the publicity wave arrived.
There isn’t much anyone can do to verify a word of that, until and unless Barron Trump surfaces with his own version, if he even has a version and Shkreli hasn’t concocted the whole yarn.
Shkreli’s record doesn’t inspire confidence. Consider the convoluted history of the album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” by the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan. The musicians recorded the album with the intention of creating just a single copy that could be played only at listening parties but not commercially exploited until 2103.
At a 2015 auction Shkreli bought it for $2 million. After his conviction for fraud, it was among the $7.36 million in assets the federal government seized to satisfy judgments against Shkreli. The arts collective PleasrDAO bought it from the government for $4.75 million, only to discover, according to a lawsuit filed earlier this month, that Shkreli had copied the album and was streaming songs from it online.
PleasrDAO has obtained a temporary restraining order prohibiting Shkreli from streaming or issuing copies of the unique album, pending a hearing scheduled for next month.
Michael Hiltzik is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
