There Is Nothing New Under the Sun, Martin Shkreli Edition

Martin Shkreli could not be more of this moment. He livestreams freewheeling monologues on YouTube to anyone who will watch. He’s been suspended from Twitter. His hiking, overnight, of the price of a lifesaving drug in 2015 from $13.50 to $750 so perfectly embodied Americans’ current complaints about health care that he was denounced by both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Last Friday, Shkreli was on three counts of fraud (and acquitted on five) in a federal court in New York. The trial was not related to that infamous price hike, but rather to hedge funds he ran before his price gouging made news. One wrinkle is that even though the jury that Shkreli deceived his hedge-fund investors, he did ultimately pay them back, albeit with money from a separate, he said he guessed his sentence would be “close to nil,” , “I think we’re going to end up appealing this.”)