Martin Shkreli released from prison into increasingly Martin Shkreli-shaped world
The "Pharma Bro" went to jail in 2017 on two counts of securities fraud.
Aux News Martin Shkreli
When Martin Shkreli became a “thing” back in 2015—which is to say, when he became generally infamous for unrepentantly hiking the price on life-saving medicines while possessing a truly awful case of Resting Shkreli Face—it was in a world where his behavior could be charitably written off, by many, as an outlier. (The “self-appointed troll” part, anyway; the relentless profiteering was already depressingly baked in to the landscape of Big Pharma.) Life in 2015 was a garbage fire, sure, but it at least had the feeling of being a controlled burn, and most people were basically able to agree that the things Shkreli were doing were, y’know, bad.
Which does not feel like it’d be the case in 2022, an era in which there is no take so bad that 100,000 people won’t retweet it, and which has just received an unwelcome injection of Shkreli straight into the body politic. Which is to say that, per Consequence, Martin Shkreli is a free man, having been released from prion this week after spending five years in jail on two counts of securities fraud and one of conspiracy to do the same.
Shkreli served a bit less than 5 years of his 7-year sentence, and is reportedly residing in a halfway house for the next few months. He re-emerges into a world that it now feels like he was the accidental and inept harbinger of, one where trolling is not only an artform but a political philosophy, the one-and-only PR tactic going, and a rule of nature itself.
Take, for instance, the fate of Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album Shkreli bought and then held hostage like a sort of rap-focused wannabe supervillain several years back. The album was seized, as part of roughly $7.3 million in Shkreli’s assets by the government…then auctioned off to a cryptocurrency collective. Netflix is supposedly going to make a movie about it! It’s like, by locking Shkreli away (for defrauding investors, mind you, not the whole, totally legally price hike stuff), we somehow allowed his essence of unearned confidence and his conviction that there’s no such thing as bad “being told to go fuck yourself” to seep into our collective DNA.
Shkreli previously petitioned the courts to let him out early, on the grounds that he might be instrumental in creating a cure for COVID-19. He’ll probably be president in 20 years.
53 Comments
I’m beginning to think his inability to not be smirking is just the way his face is shaped.
Nah, he just hasn’t been smacked hard enough yet…. anyone know what Will Smith is up to?
“Life in 2015 was a garbage fire, sure, but it at least had the feeling of being a controlled burn, and most people were basically able to agree that the things Shkreli were doing were, y’know, bad.”You and I remember 2015 very differently.
How?
This dude was smoking weed behind Wendy’s in 2015
I’m smoking weed behind a wendys rite now
2015 seems like a completely different world. At least until the Iowa State Fair…
He’s out of prison, but his smugness is a lifetime sentence.
Yeah, for those of us witnessing it.
It’s hard to decide who, of our worst narcissistic givers of ill-informed bad takes, will be president in 20 years: Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, or this piece of shit.
Musk isn’t American-born. So the question of him becoming president largely rests on the degree to which the Supreme Court is able to gut the Constitution in the next 20 years.
So you mean thoroughly and verily?
To be fair, the requirement that a president has to be born in the US is kinda bullshit. If it went away, I think we’d see Schwarzenegger running before Musk
I mean that’s an argument in its favor
I agree I don’t want either of those idiots running but I do think it’s a shitty rule
Schwarzenegger is an old man with a bum ticker chilling on his ranch with ponies and shit.His political aspirations are behind him.
There actually was a small movement among Republicans before Arnold’s paternity scandal (which basically destroyed his political career in addition to his marriage) to try to remove the requirement because they were interested in running him. Of course these days Arnold would be far too Left for the GOP as he actually believes in things like climate change.
Remember the good ol’ days when a simple paternity or infidelity scandal could end someone’s political career? Hell, when some woman breaks her NDA and there is finally evidence of the dozen or so children Trump fathered by someone other than his three wives (each younger than the last and relationships started while he was married to the previous one), the stupid will just take it as a mark of his manhood.
It seems like we’re really close to the point where only the “live boy” part of “live boy or dead girl” matters to right-wingers any more.
I think the only things we can say for sure that matters to the party is “don’t out my orgies and cocaine parties” based on Madison Cawthorn and “don’t disagree with Donny” based on a bunch of people. Otherwise, there is no unacceptable behavior.
I have seen Republicans say Schwarzenegger is a communist now so he have to run as a Democrat to have a chance. But he at least believes in climate change and democracy so I guess that’s the very low bar we are at.
It happened in “Demolition Man”.
That is a fact, and we are in a post-fact world. He’ll be eligible.
Ted Cruz has run for president like 40 times. He was born in Canada, and didn’t emigrate to the US until he was 4 years old. He has citizenship because his parents did, but he doesn’t even have the McCain defense (born on a US military base), he just straight up was not a “natural born citizen” or whatever.They change the rules when it suits them.
Neither is Ted Cruz, but somehow that never came up in 2016, when he was the last Republican to drop out of the primary. He got so far he even picked out a running mate (Carly Fiorina LOL).
Don’t think that would work for Musk, as neither of his parents were US citizens to my knowledge.
He actually can run. The goddamn Illinois Board of Elections ruled that he’s a citizen by virtue of his being a U.S. Citizen, even though he was born in Canada. None of the many challenges or lawsuits against his status have been successful.
20? Why would they wait that long.
Oh, thank Christ, I’d forgotten about that.
My money’s on Tucker. He’s already doing the work on the ground of putting their worst ideas into the minds of voters.
Another super villain is released from Jail. He’ll team up with Elon Musk and Trump and form the shitty legion of doom.
Out of the three, I’d put money on Rogan
Presidents barely matter now, they’ll just be a digital billboard in 20 years.
Rogan has introduced numerous academics, researchers, political people, and journalists to the public. Have you listened to any of these discussions? What “bad takes” or narcism are you referring to Kareem? Maybe the Malone doctor guy episode? The standup comedian episodes are just shooting the breeze with his buddies, and the talks with hunters and extreme athletes and entertainers are for those interested and I am less familiar with them.
Straight from the horse’s ass: https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2022/joe-rogan-apologizes-for-vaccine-misinformation-and-promises-to-do-better/
Feel free to Google “Joe Rogan Bad Takes” if you want a summary of more of his bullshit.
Congratulations to Martin on his newfound freedom. Welcome back to society.
kill yourself
Eww
Everyone is scamming or getting scammed, institutions that were built to protect are now tombs hollowed out by Dominionist goons, and with the levers of power fully under their control, the rich’s primary concern is purchasing our social networks so they don’t have to hear our final, futile screams as we’re priced out into the rising ocean. The Met Ball gala lewks served and we’re here for it.
Only Sam Neill can look at a pile of shit this large with a smile
Trump/Shkreli 2024?
I expect him to start a crypto coin within minutes.
I mean… just call them Shkreli. Shkls for short.
How did this guy not get shanked his first week in? Of course, he was probably at some minimum security hotel, but still, even those dudes had to have wanted to shank him at least a little bit.
Dude is literally incapable of not looking like a douchebag in photos.
Shkreli reminds me a lot of Elon Musk, in that he pretends to be something he is very demonstrably not, and somehow folks still buy it.He casts himself as someone who is actually involved in pharmaceuticals on a scientific and technical level (see his “instrumental in creating a COVID vaccine” comment), rather than your typical finance asshole who buys companies and tries to raise prices or flip them to make them more profitable. He’s a finance bro, not a pharma bro.Much the same way Musk paints himself as a brilliant “founder” and “engineer” when his actual qualifications are “guy who has lots of money and buys companies”.
Musk at least has an engineering education and does meddle in that side of his businesses, although the more of a pet project something is for him the more it seems to be a real idea turd, like the Boring Company or his dumb submarine. Tesla and SpaceX seem to operate to a pretty significant degree on a “work around this guy as best we can” philosophy. Shkreli’s pharmaceutical background is that prolonged exposure to his face necessitates pharmaceutical treatment.
I’ve heard about him having “engineering education” but all I can find is that he has a degree in physics and economics, and dropped out of a PhD program for materials science after two days.He often fashions himself as an “engineer” but I haven’t seen any clear evidence that he actually IS an engineer. Also as far as his meddling goes, the only patent I believe has his name on it is a proprietary charging port, and none of the actually technology is in the patent, just the bit of the design that makes it only work for Teslas.
Hmm, I could’ve sworn I had read where he held a degree in mechanical engineering, but I could’ve been conflating; the closest thing I can find with a quick search is an internship with an energy storage startup.“Also as far as his meddling goes, the only patent I believe has his name on it is a proprietary charging port, and none of the actually technology is in the patent, just the bit of the design that makes it only work for Teslas.”Yeah, obviously I’m not part of any of the companies so I can’t speak with authority, but it’s pretty well-established that for all his efforts to appear involved with the actual tech side of things he has contributed nothing meaningful on the design side of either SpaceX or Tesla. His pet projects don’t even sound like there’s really much there to patent; they’re more stoner ideas than anything else. I don’t think you can patent “a subway, but for CARS” or “a submarine, but TINY.” So there’s the fact that, for the companies that might be making actual contributions to human progress, he doesn’t have any meaningful contributions; while on the other side, the companies he seems to have more direct input in are sideshows that may even cause more problems than they solve.
It’s a testament to his own self-mythologizing that even people who see him for the fraud he is still tend to believe some of the falsehoods he’s perpetuated because they’ve become so ingrained (not a knock on you specifically, it’s really widespread because he’s worked so hard to build his invented persona as THE genius of our time). I was visiting my parents a while back and my mom was watching the news and some story came on about some dumb shit Musk did, and my mom commented about him being smart, but just being shitty in general.When I told her how he basically just built up the myth that he was “smart” himself, by buying into companies and installing himself with titles like “founder” and “chief engineer” but actually didn’t found any of these companies or come up with any of the tech, she was like “Hmm. I didn’t know that.”And I think most people who aren’t terminally online and haven’t dug deeper into Musk generally DON’T know that he’s responsible for creating his own false persona as a super genius inventor, when he’s really just a Silicon Valley investor bro.
Complicated haircut, bro. Looks low on resources.
And he’ll be a Senate candidate by 2024.
This writing piece told me nothing useful except that pharmabro guy got out of prison. I thought this was a news article so I clicked on it but it doesn’t offer much.