Which,of course,is what happened.
Although Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud in 2017,it was Daraprim that made him infamous. Yet no matter how much anger his outrageous price hike generated,there was nothing anyone could do. Shkreli could have raised the price 10,000 per cent if he'd wanted. He saw a flawed system,and exploited it. Even though he wound up disgraced,his price hike was perfectly legal.
I thought of Shkreli on when I read a tweet by Senator Tom Cotton,a conservative Republican from Arkansas. The tweet was about WeWork,and the senator expressed fury at what former We Co. CEO Adam Neumann had just gotten away with:
Even in the unlikely event that the WeWork story has a happy ending now that its primary investor,SoftBank Group has control of it,the company's spectacular implosion is going to linger for a very long time. Books are going to be written,podcasts are going to be recorded,documentaries and TV series and feature films are going to be aired.
And you can bet that Adam Neumann is going to be at the red-hot centre of it all. Here he is,an unknown entrepreneur,negotiating a deal in a limo with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son,that would give the company a $US20 billion ($29.3 billion) valuation! There he is spending $US80 million buying five homes (including one in San Francisco with a guitar-shaped room)! He's borrowing tens of millions of dollars from a credit facility led by JPMorgan Chase&Co. against his WeWork shares. He's selling millions of dollars of shares when WeWork raises money from private investors. He's buying commercial buildings and then leasing office space to WeWork. He trademarks the word"We"and then tries to sell it to his own company for $US5.9 million. (That deal doesn't fly.) And finally,of course,once the company has been decimated,he sells his stock to a now-desperate SoftBank for $US1 billion as a condition of his leaving the premises. Plus SoftBank gives him a $US185 million"consulting fee."And a $US500 million line of credit to pay back the credit facility.
Martin Shkreli,step aside. Adam Neumann will soon be the new"most hated man in America."When even a free market Republican like Tom Cotton expresses disgust at Neumann's greed,you know that the WeWork founder is soon going to be a pinata,just as Shkreli was.