How much is Martin Shkreli worth? At least $45 million
Martin Shkreli, whose 5,000 percent increase in the price of a life-saving medication caused him to be called "the most hated man in America," has built a fortune of at least $45 million.
The details of Shkreli's financial assets were released in a court document, which noted that the 32-year-old secured his $5 million bond through an E-Trade brokerage account with $45 million in assets. Still, it's not likely that Shkreli will find much joy in his assets at the moment, given that he's barred from selling or transferring funds from the account.
The detail of Shkreli's fortune illustrates the financial gains he reaped from his envelope-pushing business practices. Of course, the downside of his actions are clear, given that he was arrested last month on allegations that he misappropriated $11 million in assets from Retrophin (RTRX) to pay back investors he's accused of defrauding over a five-year period.
Shkreli doesn't come from a well-heeled background. His immigrant parents held janitorial jobs, and he grew up in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, according to Bloomberg News. A bright student, he was accepted into the selective Hunter College High School, but later flunked out because, as The New York Times says, he "seemed almost allergic to working hard."
But Shkreli was ambitious, even if he wasn't a model student.
"I always wanted to start a public company and make a lot of money," he told Bloomberg News in 2014.
A combination of luck and chutzpah helped him achieve that goal, although not without run-ins with lawsuits and allegations of improprieties along the way. His first hedge fund ended up embroiled in a lawsuit from the now-defunct Lehman Brothers over allegedly failing to make the bank whole on a trade. After Lehman collapsed, Skreli said no one asked him to pay the $2.3 million judgement.
Shkreli didn't tap into the public's outrage until last year, when his drug company Turing Pharmaceuticals bought a six-decade-old anti-parasitic medication called Daraprim and raised its price by 5,000 percent, even though there were no changes in its composition.
Shkreli's wealth drew attention late last year when he bought the most expensive record album ever, paying $2 million for the only copy of the new Wu-Tang Clan album "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin." (The good news for Wu-Tang Clan is that leader RZA told Bloomberg he's already cashed the check.)
If assets in Shkreli's E-Trade account fall below $5 million, the brokerage firm is supposed to contact the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York within one business day.