Former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli was found guilty on three of the eight counts involving securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. Photo / Getty Images
Former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli was found guilty on three of the eight counts involving securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. Photo / Getty Images
Over five long years, filmmaker Brent Hodge put himself inside so-called "pharma bro" Martin Shkreli's world.
He moved into the drug company boss' building, stoked his giant ego on livestreams and talked to people who knew the Brooklyn native before he did everything to earn the title of "world's most hated man".
It was a job not many would volunteer for. Shkreli, who is now serving a seven-year jail term for fraud, is not the most appealing character to spend time with.
He is an egomaniac whose decision to hike the price of lifesaving drugs by 5500 per cent was superseded only by his smug reaction to the outrage.
Next week, when Hodge's documentary Pharma Bro is released to audiences, they will see what he saw.
"It's all a performance," Hodge told the New York Post. "He likes to play up his position as a supervillain."
That is the takeaway. That through it all, Shkreli revelled in the spotlight he had created for himself.
He loved the headlines that followed a decision in 2015 to raise the price of Daraprim — a drug used by cancer sufferers, pregnant women, newborns and those with HIV — from $US13.50 ($A18.65) per tablet to $US750 ($A1036) per tablet.
Many chronically ill people could simply no longer afford their meds.
The filmmaker said Shkreli insisted on doing his own public relations following the price hike – which was a "car crash", he added.
Martin Shkreli, the former Turing Pharmaceuticals executive, became known as 'Pharma Bro' and was once dubbed the most hated man in America. Photo / Getty Images
Shkreli told reporters that his one regret was not raising the price even more.
"I probably would have raised prices higher," he said.
Hodge tells audiences in his 90-minute documentary that the Shkreli circus "wasn't helped by Martin being a jerk".
How Shkreli rose up the chain
The son of European immigrants, Shkreli was born and raised in Brooklyn. He was a gifted student who skipped ahead of his peers but never liked the "conformity or expectations" of school.
He graduated with a business degree from Baruch College in New York in 2004 and within two years was the head of his own hedge fund, Elea Capital Management, aged in his 20s.
His position afforded him power but collapsed within a year under the weight of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.
"I learned a lot about using leverage, the perils of leverage," Shkreli said of a $US2.6 million ($A3.5m) gamble-gone-bad.
"Back then, this was almost 10 years ago, I was rushing to succeed. I made a monster bet that the market would crash, and I was wrong."
He soon bounced back, however, with MSMB Capital Management, his second hedge fund, before he began his first foray into pharmaceuticals.
In 2011, Shkreli acquired pharmaceutical company Retrophin along with the rights to sell Thiola, a drug used by 20,000 patients in the US to treat rare and incurable kidney diseases, including a chronic lifelong illness called cystinuria, developed in childhood.
He quickly bumped the price from $2 to $42.
That was the beginning of a trend that soon turned the public against him. He was labelled "morally bankrupt" when, four years later, he raised the price of Daraprim.
Which brings us to the five-year project Pharma Bro — a work of filmmaking that is certain to anger as many people as it interests.
