‪‪Martin Shkreli‬ Trivia: 25 facts about the American businessman!

Martin Shkreli is an American businessman and former hedge fund manager.

Let’s see some intriguing facts about him!

1. Martin Shkreli was born March 17, 1983 in Coney Island Hospital, Brooklyn.

2. He is the son of Albanian and Croatian immigrants who worked as janitors.

3. He, his two sisters, and his brother grew up in a working class community in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

4. Shkreli was raised Catholic and attended Sunday school as a child.

5. Shkreli attended Hunter College High School.

6. He dropped out before his senior year due to a lack of interest, but received the credits necessary for his diploma through a program that placed him in an internship at Wall Street hedge fund Cramer, Berkowitz and Company when he was 17.

7. Sources differ on whether Shkreli graduated from Hunter or whether he received sufficient credits there but actually graduated from City-As-School High School.

8. Shkreli received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Baruch College in 2004.

9. Shkreli told Vanity Fair that he developed an interest in chemistry when a family member suffered from treatment-resistant depression.

10. In March 2015, Hunter College High School announced that Shkreli donated $1,000,000 to them.

11. During Shkreli’s time at Cramer, Berkowitz and Company, he recommended short-selling a biotech stock, believing that the company’s share price would drop. When it did so, Cramer’s hedge fund profited.

12. In 2003, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals was testing a weight‑loss drug, and Shkreli, then 19, predicted that the stock price would fall.

13. Shkreli’s prediction drew the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which investigated Shkreli’s knowledge about the stock but was unable to prove wrongdoing on his part

14. He is the co-founder of the hedge funds Elea Capital, MSMB Capital Management, MSMB Healthcare, co-founder and former chief executive officer (CEO) of the biotechnology firm Retrophin, and founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals.

15. In September 2015, Shkreli received widespread criticism when Turing obtained the manufacturing license for the antiparasitic drug Daraprim and raised its price by a factor of 56 (from US$13.5 to US$750 per pill), leading him to be referred to as “the most hated man in America” and “pharma bro”.

16. In December 2015, Shkreli was arrested by the FBI after being indicted on federal charges of securities fraud.

17. He subsequently resigned as CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals and was replaced by the company’s board chairman, Ron Tilles.

18. Shkreli was convicted of two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiring to commit securities fraud in August 2017.

19. Shkreli has a variety of interests ranging from collecting rare music albums to video gaming. He is an avid League of Legends player and in May 2014 he began expressing interest in purchasing an eSports team, Enemy eSports announced that it had rejected a US$1.2 million offer from Shkreli.

20. He later founded his own team, Odyssey eSports, and aimed to qualify for the 2015 North American League of Legends Challenger Series. The team failed to qualify.

21. In August 2015, Odyssey merged with another team to become the organisation Team Imagine, with Shkreli becoming chairman of the team. During the merger, the organisation signed the Dota 2 team Leviathan.

22. In January 2017, Shkreli’s Twitter account was suspended after repeatedly tweeting about dating journalist Lauren Duca, and then sharing Photoshopped pictures of himself with Duca on his account.

23. In another Tweet, Shkreli had promoted “clovergender awareness”, referring to a hoax trend of adults identifying as children, while also being sexually attracted to them.

24. In May 2017, Shkreli confirmed on his Facebook page that he had been banned permanently from Twitter.

25. In October 2015, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders acknowledged having received a $2,700 donation from Shkreli, whom he had previously called a “poster child of greed”. Sanders, however, said he would forward the money to Whitman-Walker Health, a D.C. community clinic known for its expertise in HIV/AIDS healthcare.