Martin Shkreli May Spend 20 Years in Prison | Hacker News Reader

Martin Shkreli May Spend 20 Years in Prison

fortune.com

Time to attempt to defend Shkreli again because while I find him to definitely be of questionable moral character, I get even more sore at the unhinged Shkreli-bashing by everyone I know which seems to be based almost entirely on mood affiliation and tribalism.

The reasons for him being the "most hated man in America" mentioned at the end of the article are:

>increasing the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000%, holding an anticipated Wu-Tang album hostage, harassing women on Twitter, and for his smug court appearances.

Does it seem odd that those are all lumped together in people's minds? Only the first one should have any bearing on the question of whether he's actually loathsome.

* Holding the Wu-Tang album hostage is a totally reasonable thing to do, he did pay an exorbitant price for the right of exclusivity after all. Most people in the hip hop community seem to hold the whole incident more against RZA than against Shkreli in any case.

* The claim of harassing women appears to be false, based on the evidence they linked to. I followed their link and it appears his harassment consists of inviting women to go to the presidential inauguration with him. When they turned him down (in the most insulting terms they could personally think of, apparently) he didn't say any more. So that's harassment now?

* >his smug court appearances. Not exactly a federal offense.

The serious allegation is about raising the price of a life-saving drug, and on this point I totally understand hating him. I can't bring myself to hate him based on that though.

Personally I don't see how it's much different to take a ridiculously underpriced drug and raise the price to what the market will bear vs. being CEO of a company and keeping your drugs' prices at its historically high point. I know everyone hates CEO's of pharmaceutical companies anyways but my point is how is he any worse than the lot of them? Purely because of emotion.

I don't think you have the full facts regarding how he behaved towards Lauren Duca.

https://www.refinery29.com/2017/08/166717/lauren-duca-martin...

These subsequent actions he took are harassment, I agree.

you know... he's going to jail for none of the reasons you provided, and instead for plain old fraud.

Fraud sounds like a perfectly normal thing to go to jail for.

Yeah I don't think I emphasized quite enough that my post was against Shkreli-bashing, not objecting to him going to jail for fraud.

Most people are simply applying social pressure against norm breaking anyways - often times they do not literally mean that he should go to jail - it is simply how people talk about offensive behavior in general.

I'm happy to bash him as well, but I still think the actual jail time should be on legal not social law breaking. Everyone hates someone that is a douchebag, and this guy embraces it making him a perfect target.

> Personally I don't see how it's much different to take a ridiculously underpriced drug and raise the price to what the market will bear vs. being CEO of a company and keeping your drugs' prices at its historically high point. I know everyone hates CEO's of pharmaceutical companies anyways but my point is how is he any worse than the lot of them? Purely because of emotion.

This, it seems like people consider Shkreli to be the the "designated punching bag" for Big Pharma, directing their ire and outrage at him specifically instead of the industry as a whole.

Maybe you can't bring yourself to hate a person with absolutely no regard for other human lives, but many wouldn't shed a tear if he was executed for that. I know I wouldn't and I don't even support the death penalty. 20 years is still too short for this subhuman psychopath.

I love this guy because he gives us a genuine and unfinessed view of how brazen pharma is. His outspokenness is unique but his business dealings are not.

Some will says that this sends a strong message, but I think the only take away people in similar situations will have is: keep your mouth shut if you're exploiting the system.

Shkreli is being made an example of because he's an easy target, with relatively shallow pockets.

Compare him to the Sackler family, the sociopaths behind Oxy, for example...

Get them a life sentence, sounds good to me

20 years prison seem ridiculously high in the light of the fact that most of the investors gained money instead of loosing money. He might have abused or misused invested money but in the end they benefited from it, if I understood the news stories correctly.

Other reports indicate that Shkreli only started returning money to MSMB investors AFTER the SEC began investigating.

I think it is important to show our financial laws have real teeth. A hard sentence acts as a warning to others.

This punishment looks unusual, though. Shkreli called too much attention towards these unethical business model, but there are more people doing it. If he's the only one convicted that harshly, it just sends a signal that you can do it, but with more discretion.

Whether or not they benefitted from his actions, he still defrauded them, essentially. The ends should never justify the means. Our legal should not take that into account when assessing penalties.

Just because you settle and repay people with OTHER money, doesn't mean that you didn't commit fraud prior to paying them with _unrelated funds_.

That's not how things work. The man committed fraud, entering into another scheme - got lucky - enough to pay off the previous people he jilted. That does not mean the crimes committed prior to the pharma scheme should be ignored.

There's very few crimes in my mind that would justify 20 years in prison and fraud definitely isn't one of them

I don't think he deserves it

> ...held responsible for $10.4 million in losses

If you steal a car, you go to jail. This dude stole 400+ cars. Does 20 years really seem out the question?

If you steal 400 Honda Civics and return 400 Teslas in their place (by Lying/Deceiving Owners), should you go to jail? Not defending him in regards to the law, but whether he "deserves" it or not seems to me a reasonable question

> This dude stole 400+ cars.

More like he borrowed 400 Hondas and returned 400 BMWs.

Early on in the Shkreli ordeal I was certainly rooting for him to get a massive legal smack upside the head.

After watching the, frankly, zeal by which people pursued and relished in his downfall, especially in contrast to the amount of white collar crime that goes entirely unaddressed (or is considered "legal" by some absurd standard of judgement, e.g. the equifax pre-vuln stock sales) it seems like a capricious and uneven enforcement for the sake of "proving a point" (or "because he made himself so easy to hate" depending on how you look at it). In either case I find it an unsettling impetus for such aggressive enforcement.

Do I think he should be punished? Absolutely. Do I think his proceeding has become a circus largely driven by "soft" factors? Absolutely. Take this rant as largely a wish that we'd pay this much attention to the piles of far more insidious issues in our governmental/financial systems rather than seeing how hard we can steamroll some spoiled idiot, and a concern for the precedent normalizing this retribution sets.

I wonder how his parents feel about him? Are they proud? Disappointed? Indifferent?

I remember reading that his parents were working class, he didn't grow up a rich kid. It's hard to imagine how they could instill the work ethic in him that they seem to have without also instilling a moral compass, but maybe he's just chemically imbalanced.

This comment is far too much supposition for this board, apologies.

> It's hard to imagine how they could instill the work ethic in him that they seem to have without also instilling a moral compass

It's not at all hard to believe that they could instill a value system focussed on working toward material gain while not instilling a value system focussed on values that compete with working toward material gain.

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