Martin Shkreli Just Got Fired From His Other Job as CEO

Shkreli recently became the CEO of a second company, KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, Inc., based in South San Francisco, California. Shortly before 11am ET on Monday, Shkreli tweeted: “I was hacked – I now have control of this account”.

Shkreli has often used Twitter to parry with critics, project what some call a “pharma-bro” persona-which includes a love of hip-hop that led him to buy an unreleased Wu-Tang Clan album for $2 million-and even make industry connections.

Shkreli was already widely reviled because a drug company he founded raised the price of a life-saving drug from $13.50 to $750 per pill. A Federal Bureau of Investigation official earlier said Shkreli pursued “a securities fraud trifecta of lies, deceit and greed”. To pay back his disgruntled clients, he allegedly looted $11 million from Retrophin, where he was CEO.

Elsewhere in the interview, Shkreli also claims his arrest came because he had upset federal authorities when he controversially increased the price of Darapim, adding that he believes the American government had adopted a strategy of “trying to find anything we could to stop him”. “The allegations against me are baseless and without merit”, he wrote. The hackers changed Shkreli’s name to “Martin The God” and his bio to “f*** Yall…”.

Although only there for a short time, there were indicators that Shkreli was going to be using similar business tactics at KaloBios that he displayed at Turing.

KaloBios, which was planning to wind down, named Shkreli as its CEO on November 20, after Shkreli and a consortium of investors bought about 70 percent of the company’s shares.

He was charged with securities fraud and conspiracy for setting up a Ponzi-like scheme at his former hedge fund MSMB Capital Management and Retrophin Inc. He tweeted this morning that he had regained control.

Shkreli, who gained notoriety this year when Turing hiked the price of an anti-infective drug often taken by people with AIDS, was arrested on fraud charges on Thursday and released on bail. Kalobios shares rose from less than a $1 to a high of almost $40 under his brief leadership, but its stocks have stopped trading in the wake of Shkreli’s legal drama.