Do we like them?

Do we like Martin Shkreli?

Our score: 1 out of 10. A fraud conviction, a court-ordered lifetime industry ban, targeted online abuse of a journalist and no verified good deeds to set against it.

Shkreli became a household name in 2015, when his company took over the rights to Daraprim, an antiparasitic drug, and lifted the price from $13.50 to $750 a pill. He defended the move as “capitalism at work”, arguing insurance and other programs would get the drug to people who needed it. Plenty of people, including regulators, saw it very differently.

Separately from the drug saga, he was convicted in 2017 of securities fraud over his hedge fund and Retrophin dealings, then sentenced in 2018 to seven years. He served his time and was released in 2022. That one was about investors, not patients, but it made the pattern hard to ignore.

The Daraprim case caught up with him too. In January 2022 Judge Denise Cote ordered him to return $64.6 million in profits and barred him from the pharmaceutical industry for life. The FTC and seven states had alleged a web of anticompetitive restrictions to keep cheaper generics off the market, and the Inquirer reports a federal court found he had suppressed generic competition.

The recent chapter is the messy one. The FTC and states allege he livestreamed himself trading at least 60 drug stocks and shorted some, in breach of the ban, and they want a fine matching his profits, divestment and possible jail time. The Inquirer's report carried no response from him, so that's where it stands: alleged, and before a judge.

On the good stuff, we couldn't find verified charity or kind acts to set against all this. What's out there is a comeback story: a July 2026 Bloomberg Law profile has him back running finance software and still ready to fight. Fans of his streams may like the show, but it isn't a good deed.

So where does that leave us? A court found he mastermind-ed a scheme to keep affordable medicine out of reach, a jury convicted him of defrauding investors, and he's now accused of poking the ban he was handed. Not a bloke to cheer for, mate.