Shkreli Quotes

I know it’s hard to imagine, but even a president of the United States could act like Shkreli

Shkreli was a pie-splitter: he had the pie-splitting mentality. This mentality views the pie as being fixed in size. Then, the only way to increase one member’s share of the pie is to split it differently, by reducing the shares of others. These other members are your rivals, whom you fight to grab as much of the pie as possible.

By far the main stakeholder Shkreli took from was customers – patients and health insurance companies. But Shkreli also took from his colleagues, who may have joined a biotech start-up excited about inventing new drugs, but instead spent their days ordered to squeeze higher profits from existing drugs. He took from suppliers, because the restricted sale and thus production of Daraprim slashed the demand for its inputs. And he took from communities, because reduced access to Daraprim hurt patients, their families and their friends.

In Shkreli’s relentless pursuit of profit, he paid little heed to growing the pie by developing new drugs. Worse still, his actions shrunk the pie. By restricting access to Daraprim, there was less around to benefit society. But if investors’ share of the pie increases enough, their slice rises even if the pie shrinks,

Pie-splitting didn’t require the substantial expense, time and risk of developing a new medicine, getting approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and marketing it. And it was entirely lawful. As Shkreli brazenly declared, ‘Everything we’ve done is legal’ and ‘I liken myself to the robber barons’8 – late-19th-century American businessmen who used similarly unscrupulous, yet legal, strategies to get rich.

Shkreli’s money-making strategy was to forget about investing in new medicines, and instead to buy existing ones on the cheap, hike their prices and restrict their supply. Turing started out with three drugs – ketamine for depression, oxytocin to induce labour and a ganglionic blocker for hypertension – all acquired from Retrophin. On 10 August 2015, Turing bought Daraprim for $55 million. The very next day, it executed the 5,500% price increase.

Neff had bragged on Twitter about having heard Tha Carter V—an unreleased Lil Wayne album that had come into the hands of Martin Shkreli, who shared some of the tracks with Anna, who in turn played them for Neff.

Such a strategy might seem like outrageous greed, but it was second nature to Martin Shkreli, Turing’s 32-year-old CEO.

Shkreli was a pie-splitter: he had the pie-splitting mentality. This mentality views the pie as being fixed in size. Then, the only way to increase one member’s share of the pie is to split it differently, by reducing the shares of others.