Martin Shkreli

Martin Shkreli

Martin Shkreli is the co-founder of the hedge funds Elea Capital, MSMB Capital Management, and MSMB Healthcare. He is the former chief executive officer of the pharmaceutical firms Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals. In September 2015, he was widely criticized when Turing obtained the manufacturing license for the antiparasitic drug Daraprim and raised its price by a factor of 56. He was sentenced to seven years in federal prison and up to USD 7. 4 million in fines.

About Martin Shkreli in brief

Summary Martin ShkreliMartin Shkreli is the co-founder of the hedge funds Elea Capital, MSMB Capital Management, and MSMB Healthcare. He is the former chief executive officer of the pharmaceutical firms Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals. In September 2015, he was widely criticized when Turing obtained the manufacturing license for the antiparasitic drug Daraprim and raised its price by a factor of 56. He was sentenced to seven years in federal prison and up to USD 7. 4 million in fines. In 2017, Shk Reli was charged and convicted in federal court on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiring to commit securities fraud, unrelated to the Darprim controversy. He also founded Gödel Systems, which he founded in August 2016. He dropped out of Hunter College High School before his senior year but received the credits necessary for his high school diploma through a program that placed him in an internship at Wall Street hedge fund Cramer, Berkowitz and Company when he was 17. He received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Baruch College in 2004. His parents immigrated to the United States and worked as janitors. Through his father, he is related to the ShKreli, an Albanian tribe that inhabits northwestern Albania, western Kosovo, and eastern Montenegro. He, his two sisters, and his brother grew up in a working-class community in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. He attended Sunday school as a child.

He developed an interest in chemistry when a family member suffered from treatment-resistant depression. He worked as a financial analyst for Intrepid Capital Management and UBS Wealth Management. He then started his first hedge fund, Elea capital Management, in 2006. In 2007, Lehman Brothers sued Elea in New York state court for failing to cover a ‘put option transaction’ in which Shkrelli bet the wrong way on a broad market decline. In 2009, he started MSMBcapital Management, which took its name from the initials of the two founding portfolio managers, ShKrelli and his childhood friend, Marek Biestek. On February 1, 2011, in a naked short sale on an account it held with Merrill Lynch, MS MB Capital sold short 32 million shares of Orexigen Therapeutics stock at about USD 2. 50 per share the day after its price plunged from USD 9, when the Food and Drug Administration declined to approve the drug nonebupropion. The stock; MSMB could not cover the position, although it had told Merrill Lynch that it could not. In 2011, he filed requests with the FDA to reject a new cancer diagnostic device from Navidea Biopharmaceuticals and an inhalable insulin therapy from Mann-Kind Corporation. In 2013, he told investors that he could create an asset that he might be able to use to placate his investors. In 2014, he said that he would use the money to create an insolvent and insolvent company.