When I first heard this story, my instinct was that Shkreli must secretly be the good guy, because evil is never so bald-faced in its cruelty. Real-life evil hides behind paperwork, or "the system," or just shrugging its shoulders and saying its hands are tied. Shkreli, on the other hand, was standing in front of America with his arms spread wide and proudly explaining that he thought money was more important than human life. Everyone who has ever looked him in the eye has imagined him lowering a gagged woman in a sparkly red dress into a glass tank full of mutant hammerhead sharks. The guy had branded himself as an evil mastermind as effectively as Jennifer Lawrence branded herself as a sexy klutz. All for a drug that only 2,000 Americans use every year.
But what's really weird is that what he did isn't actually weird. The entire pharmaceutical industry runs on this kind of money-gouging malarkey. Every single pharmaceutical CEO in the world does exactly what Shkreli did -- the difference is they don't go on MSNBC to brag about it.
Surely once he realized his mistake, he scurried back into his Millionaire Cave to do more surreptitious evil, right? Wrong.
Why We Still Know About Him
The Shkrells has spent every single day since he hiked that price finding new ways to get his goofy-ass face in front of you in the most punchable contexts conceivable. He agreed to an interview with Vice that not only butchered a bunch of basic facts (he wasn't arrested for price gouging, and he didn't start funding the punk label after the Daraprim scandal) but seemed designed to depict him as a villain. He spends the rest of his time hanging out on Twitter picking fights with anyone who makes fun of him Periscoping images of himself almost playing guitar and pretending to rip up checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Here he is doing the more douchey of those two things.