Everyone has heard of The Pharma Bro, Martin Shkreli. This man is known as being the epitome of corporate greed. Shkreli was the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, a company which has recently purchased a drug called Daraprim, which is “used to treat rare but serious parasitic infections in aids patients”. (Kohlatkar, 2017) Shrekli was the one that increased the price from US$13.50 to US$750 per pill, overnight, that’s 56x what is was before. (Long and Egan, 2015) The the ethical side of the raise in the pill is almost non-existing. Shkreli claims the new profit from selling the pill would go into research and development of a new, cheaper and similar drug, the problem is that that usually would come from investors and not from consumers, the consumers really don’t have say in what a company does with their money, but investors do, they expect specific results and a follow through with plans. The CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals seems to really be abusing his power here, but the worst part is that he has been recently arrest and convicted not because of the hike in price of Daraprim, but because he committed fraud.

Martin Shkreli has recently been found guilty of fraud. He was found guilty of defrauding investors in his former hedge fund (MSMB Capital Management), by stealing stock from shareholders of Retrophin (a different company he worked for) and used those shares to repay his hedge-fund investors. (Kohlatkar, 2017)

All in all Martin Shkreli has proved that he really lacks plenty of morals. He focuses on the finance, the profit of the company over everything else. He lacks what R. Edward Freeman calls Stakeholder Theory. Shkreli doesn’t have a balance in his work place, he doesn’t seems to care about the rules or his customers. Shkreli really doesn’t abide by the “social responsibility” mentioned in Milton Friedman’s “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”. An executive should spend money from his investors and shareholders as he/she states he/she will. By stealing money invested in one company to pay off someone else Shkreli lied to the shareholders of Retrophin. With that said, Shkreli upholds an idea that he is unable to control peoples money ethically, therefore how should customers trust that he will use the money from more expensive pills to create cheaper pills in the future

 

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Sources:

1 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/business/dealbook/martin-shkreli-jail.html?mcubz=1

2 http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/22/investing/aids-drug-martin-shkreli-750-cancer-drug

3 https://www.youtube.com/embed/bIRUaLcvPe8

4 https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-540-70818-6_14.pdf

Pics

1 https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/martin-shkreli-and-the-temptations-of-self-dealing

2 https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/martin-shkreli-on-capitol-hill/3/