How do you get to be called the “Most hated CEO in America?”
It’s almost tough – scamming investors? Making a Croesus-like salary?
If you’re Martin Shkreli, it happened when he dramatically raised the price of a life-saving drug. His response?
“The spotlight doesn’t matter to me,” he says, as he settles into his newest role, as CEO of San Francisco’s KaloBios.
It should be mentioned, that while web headlines called him (and I quote) an “a**hole,” and even Hillary Clinton chastised him on Twitter for boosting a drug from $13.50 a pill to $750, investors cheered his move to the Bay Area.
When Shkreli announced his plan to buy a majority of the KaloBios (KBIO) shares, and become the company’s new CEO, the stock shot up 4,000 percent.
And, speaking to us from the nearly empty KaloBios HQ (Shkreli says he has plans to “double, maybe triple” the staff of 12 in the next few months), Shkreli remains defiant. “At the end of the day my constituency is not the media, it's my investors, and the patients who we all work for together."
Drug development is expensive. Shkreli says he’ll spend lots of money to help KaloBios’ future drugs, focused on fighting leukemia.
Scott covers tech on Twitter: @scottbudman
