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Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud

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Re: Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud

#181

Post by [deleted] »

MSM wrote: post #173
burkaman wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trolling is lying. Either you believe terrible things, or you lie about believing them to make people angry. Normal lying is usually intended for personal gain, trolling is just lies intended to hurt other people.

>Trolling is lying Not at all, I think one of the most famous "troll" things he did was buy the master Wu-Tang album and threaten to destroy it so no one could ever hear the album. There's no lying or anything meant to "hurt" anyone there, but you can imagine that it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

[deleted]

Re: Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud

#182

Post by [deleted] »

jjxw wrote: post #118

There seems to be a misconception regarding what Shkreli was found guilty of. The legal case here has very little to do with the pharmaceutical pricing controversy - it is a separate case based on a separate hedge fund that he managed. The gist of it is that he took people's money to start a hedge fund, lied to investors that the fund was doing fine when the hedge fund went belly up, but ended up returning everyone's…

[deleted]

Re: Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud

#183

Post by Clubber »

Lewton wrote: post #113
RunawayGalaxy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, he claims that he gave the medicine away for free to people who could prove they couldn't afford it, so that he was really only screwing insurance companies. I believe that he was trying to draw media attention to the outrageous, legally-allowed colluding practices of the insurance and pharma industries. It would have been in his best interest to not draw attention to himself and slowly raise the price of the d…

Find one person who got it for free

Patrick Rice gets it free for life after a Reddit AMA. Google not work for you, or were you trying to stonewall the discussion with Rush Limbaugh tactics?

http://nypost.com/2016/02/02/i-was-a-victim-of-the-pharma-ja...

Re: Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud

#184

Post by pm90 »

benesch wrote: post #136
blahblah3 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because his investors made money doesn't excuse him. Suppose you lent 10,000 to a friend and the friend promised to return it within a year. A year later, your friend doesn't pay you back and makes a bunch of excuses. Instead, he takes the 5,000 he has left to the casino, gambles it on the roulette wheel and by luck manages to turn that into 30,000 and pays you back 1.5 years later. I don't think you would be ha…

You might find FedEx's origin story interesting. > “I asked Fred where the funds had come from, and he responded, ‘The meeting with the General Dynamics board was a bust and I knew we needed money for Monday, so I took a plane to Las Vegas and won $27,000.’ I said, ‘You mean you took our last $5,000— how could you do that?’ He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘What difference does it make? Without the funds for the f…

Technically, Fred committed a fraud (actually I forget the technical term for the crime where you misuse funds). Its just that he wasn't prosecuted for it.

Re: Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud

#185

Post by jamra »

wfunction wrote: post #78
kbenson wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I'll bite. Why do you think he's human garbage? You felt strongly enough to reply, maybe you can muster the effort to explain why you think that?

> Okay, I'll bite. Why do you think he's human garbage. Obtaining a license just to increase a drug's price from $13.50 to $750 for no apparent reason other than greed isn't enough for you?

I believe he reinvests 80% back into R&D. That's a pretty large sum. It's a lot more than the big companies. If a better drug for toxoplasmosis is developed that doesn't kill people, it would have been a great achievement.

Re: Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud

#186

Post by sigmar »

fnovd wrote: post #97
sigmar wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not fraud if investors make money? Someone better tell Madoff that he's getting out.

The operative word here is "all."

That doesn't matter. Lying during a business deal is still fraud.

Re: Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud

#187

Post by hellofunk »

MichaelGG wrote: post #164
hellofunk wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was free to any individual who wished to obtain it, with Martin footing the bill. [0] "... it says that the drug is available for free to people with deep financial need. But Dr. Aberg has watched her patients have to "jump through the hoops" to get it. Patients have to prove both financial need and health status, something that's difficult to focus on when their lives are in danger. In June, one of her patients…

So in order to save ~100% on a $100,000 treatment, they have to "jump though the hoops" and prove they need it (otherwise everyone would just do that?). OK?

There's nothing like laying down a thick bureaucratic obstacle of red-tape on thousands of very sick people during the key moments of their treatment.

Re: Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud

#188

Post by Sangermaine »

discombobulate wrote: post #77

I quite like Martin. I talked to him a few time on YouTube, whilst he was live streaming. He's whip-smart & knowledgeable. He does, however, have a couple of major flaws. 1) He trolls. Hard. 2) It seems he lies. Which I picked up from a previous news article. (He claimed to have ~$50mm under management @ his previous hedge fund. It was more like $1.6mm. Something like that). I can forgive the trolling. It's over the…

>He's whip-smart & knowledgeable.

People keep saying this as if it matters. What did you expect, that he'd be a drooling idiot? So he's smart and personable. Of course he is, most con men are.

Re: Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud

#189

Post by singhrac »

Clubber wrote: post #143
blahblah3 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because his investors made money doesn't excuse him. Suppose you lent 10,000 to a friend and the friend promised to return it within a year. A year later, your friend doesn't pay you back and makes a bunch of excuses. Instead, he takes the 5,000 he has left to the casino, gambles it on the roulette wheel and by luck manages to turn that into 30,000 and pays you back 1.5 years later. I don't think you would be ha…

Honestly, I would be thrilled to triple my money in 18 months. Using the gambling analogy is disingenuous though.

I don't see why it's disingenuous? Investing is extremely risky, and I'm not convinced that he didn't just get lucky on the second bet.

This isn't ok because the original investor was paid off. That's also how Ponzi schemes work - the original investors are paid off (I know, here the money seems to be generated from Retrophin, but the behavior is the same).

This gave me a perspective: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-12-17/martin-sh...

Re: Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud

#190

Post by michrassena »

CydeWeys wrote: post #27
cloakandswagger wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. My initial perception of Shkreli was the commonly accepted one of revulsion and hatred. After watching the Vice piece, plus a lot of Shkreli's finance talks and live streams, I find him pretty charming and unbelievably intelligent.

The outrageous price increases directly led to people dying because they couldn't afford life-saving medication. There's no redeeming yourself from that just because you're charming or intelligent. Psychopaths often are.

I think it's interesting that since we can put a face and a name on that behavior, it's easy to see that if those price hikes led to someone's death, his actions were immoral or downright evil. It's easy to draw a direct line from his actions to someone else's suffering.

It's well established that what he did so wantonly happens in more hushed tones as a matter of business. The lines are blurred, we find it hard to point fingers at individuals. If Skreli's actions are immoral, so are the actions of the anonymous thousands like him. This is the textbook "banality of evil", and we can see similar consequences everywhere. This seems like classic Philosophy 101 material, is it moral to raise the cost of food when someone will starve?

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