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A CEO Who Gives Free Markets a Bad Name

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

If Martin Shkreli is not the most hated man in America, he must least be first runner-up.

If his name doesn't ring a bell, you're not alone. He's probably less well known for who he is than for what he did.

Shkreli, 32, is the Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO who decided to raise the price of Daraprim, a drug used to treat toxoplasmosis in cancer and AIDS patients, by more than 5,000 percent.

Although he admitted in interviews with Bloomberg TV and CNBC last Monday (Sept. 21) that the drug costs less than a dollar to make, Shkreli raised to price from $13.50 a tablet to $750.

"At this price it's a reasonable profit," Shkreli told CBS News. "Not excessive at all."

Ah, that's what they all say. Shkreli is far from the first drug company CEO to take an old drug and boost its price. But he may well be the first to brag so brazenly about it.

 

He spent the next 24 hours in a Twitter battle with some of his new enemies, as his name trended on the social network.

"No, you are wrong," he responded to a user who tweeted "You have given people their death sentences," according to an exchange captured by the Fusion news website. But complex market arguments don't fit as easily into a tweet's 140 characters as snark does.

To a journalist who tweeted, "I think the hole you've dug is deep enough," he tweeted back, "uh f u." Ah, what a swell guy.

But by the next day, Shkreli took his Twitter account private and said he was backing off the price hike. He would make the drug more affordable, he told ABC News and NBC News on Tuesday evening. Yet, beyond assuring us that Turing will still make "a very small profit," he gave no indication as to what the new price would be.

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(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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