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Martin Shkreli just got kicked out of his company as his sad little empire crumbles

Martin Shkreli just got kicked out of his company as his sad little empire crumbles

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Shrkreli will have more free time to not listen to his Wu Tang album and face his securities fraud case

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Martin Shkreli resigned as CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals — the company where he came to notoriety for jacking up the prices on an old drug for no good reason. He is replaced by Ron Tilles, the chairman of Turing's board of directors, who presumably signed off on the price hike.

Shkreli's resignation comes after his arrest for securities fraud yesterday. It turns out that the management at his last drug company, Retrophin, say Shkreli misappropriated money to pay off his hedge fund's failed investments. Shkreli and his alleged accomplice, Evan L. Greebel (a lawyer for Retrophin), both pleaded not guilty.

"I probably would have raised the price higher" — Martin Shkreli, ladies and gentlemenTuring is where Shkreli first became a cultural punchline, after he raised the prices on the drug Daraprim in September — to $750 per pill, from $13.50. The drug is used to treat toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection, which is dangerous for anyone with a compromised immune system. Turing bought the drug, changed its distribution, and jacked up the price. Earlier this month, at a Forbes summit, Shkreli told an audience that if he could do it again, "I probably would have raised the price higher," Bloomberg reports.

Shkreli is also the CEO of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals; he was appointed in November, which is after his price gouging at Turing came to light but before anyone knew he'd purchased the only copy of the Wu Tang Clan's Once Upon a Time in Shaolin for $2 million. (Now that he's stepped down from Turing, perhaps he'll finally get around to listening to it.) Shkreli ran the same playbook at KaloBios as at Turing, acquiring the license for a standard treatment for a parasitic infection called Chagas disease. The company then announced it planned "to increase the cost from a couple hundred dollars for two months to a pricing structure like that for hepatitis-C drugs, which can run to nearly $100,000 for 12 weeks," according to Bloomberg. A call to Ed Painter, the communications officer at KaloBios, wasn't picked up, and it was impossible to leave a voicemail — the mailbox was full. So it's hard to say what Shkreli's future at KaloBios looks like.