Shkreli has been treated pretty unfairly by the media
If you actually watch his livestreams and listen to what he has to say instead of reading legacy media, you'd get a different perspective on him.
Perhaps, but only Shkreli decided to 10× his drug prices overnight. Or, as one person put it, "[Shkreli] is to a research-based company like a loan shark to a legitimate bank"
We really got the best outcome out of this stunt. He exposed real weaknesses in what we're doing and also the FDA process to market generics and instead of doing anything to fix it outside of the context of this one drug, we shot the messenger.
No, he isn't the problem, the system that enables him is. But he is an opportunistic piece of shit.
It was Daraprim/Pyrimethamine. It's used to treat toxoplasmosis. It's also been off-patent for over 40 years and another pharmaceutical could have made a generic but none thought it would be profitable enough to even bother.
For that matter, not even isolated to drugs. Charging a higher price for the same product when you are already a ludicrously profitable entity for no reason is a shitty way to treat customers.
To fund research of new drugs. Also if you raise the price of an off-patent drug, other pharmaceuticals are incentivized to manufacture a generic to compete with you and bring your prices down. At the time nobody was touching it for 40 years.
Keep in mind that this price is what was charged to insurers. Insurers negotiate the price back down. Uninsured patients up to 5x the federal poverty level were promised the drug for free.
Pharma companies in the US will charge what insurance companies are willing to pay. It's not an issue of individual greed, it's an issue of a regulatory system and set of incentives that collectively are fucking you. There are far more expensive drugs out there than Daraprim with worse markups and nobody is identifying the CEO of those companies and calling them the most hated man on earth.
He has a need for attention and a poor sense of self-preservation -- sort of like weev but without being a massive racist.