Disgraced pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli has big plans for the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album that he bought for $2 million in December: He might destroy it.
In an interview with Vice, Shkreli said that he wavers between wanting to destroy the record and putting it in some remote place so people have to go on some sort of “spiritual quest” to listen to it.
“I’m not just the heel of the music world,” he said. “I want to be the world’s heel.”
In December, the man who notoriously raised the price of an HIV drug his company produces from $13.50 to $750 per pill, revealed that he had purchased the rare Wu-Tang Clan album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.”
“I was a little worried that [Wu-Tang Clan] were going to walk out of the deal,” Shrkeli said, referring to the moment when the group learned of his business practices. “But by then we’d closed. The whole kind of thing since then has been just kind of ‘Well, do we want to announce it’s him? Do we not want to announce it’s him?’ I think they were trying to cover their butts a little bit.”
In 2011, Shkreli founded Retrophin which acquired old, neglected drugs with the intent of raising their prices substantially. The New York Times reported that Retrophin raised the price for Thiola, a pill used to treat a disease that causes kidney stones, from $1.50 to $30 a pill.
In December, he was charged with securities fraud related to his time running a hedge fund and as head of the biopharmaceutical company Retrophin. The controversy around the price hike of HIV drug Daraprim doesn’t appear to have factored in the arrest.