More than thirty years ago, a son of Albanian immigrants was growing up in a very tough part of Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay. Young and intelligent, Martin Shkreli idolized scientists, listened to rock music and was considered so bright he could skip grades in school.

But he wasn’t about to use his preternatural intelligence to become a scientist or a musician like one of his heroes. Instead he chose to start two hedge funds and short pharmaceutical stocks, making enough of money in the process to start his very own pharma company – Retrophin.

In fact, the young short seller was so good at what he did, Bloomberg Businessweek ran a story on him in early 2014, calling him a “boy genius.”

But no one outside the tightly-knit Wall Street and pharma circles had even heard his name until last year. And now, of course, he’s all over the paper and for all the wrong reasons.

How It All Started

Shkreli first attracted the hateful gaze of the media and internet when his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, raised the price of the anti-parasitic drug Daraprim after they’d bought rights to it. In one fell swoop, Shkreli managed to alienate everyone from the Wu Tang Clan to Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, when he raised the price of the drug from $13.50 per pill to a jaw-dropping $750 per pill. 

Why was this such a super villainous move? Well, Daraprim is a drug that is used to treat malaria, toxoplasmosis and HIV. Furthermore, it’s on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines and Shkreli’s price hike instantly put it out of reach for people who happen to be both sick and poor.

He was instantly recognized as one of the most hated men on American soil. Even Donald Trump called him a “spoiled brat.”

But Shkreli defended himself saying this was what he was hired to do. He raised drug prices because he said that it was impossible to turn a profit at the new company without doing so. Months later, however, the world had moved on and just when it seemed like the dust had settled, an old case pending against him came back with a bang.