The Most Hated Man in America Is Back. This Time, He’s Betting Against Everyone.

Martin Shkreli spent seven years becoming a punchline. Now he is running a one-man short-selling operation from his apartment, live-streaming his trades to tens of thousands of followers and lobbying the White House for a pardon, all while insisting the world misread him from the start.

At around 11 p.m. on a Tuesday in September, Martin Shkreli sat in front of a webcam, moved a chess piece and told his audience he had just done something he had not done in years: made his first trade in a stock called Opendoor. He typed it out on X a few minutes later, the way he announces most things now, in short bursts of certainty. He was short. He said anyone still long the stock should never invest again. Then he went back to the board.

It was vintage Shkreli. Blunt, needling, oddly theatrical, and, within hours, proven at least partly right: Opendoor shares fell. It was also, in miniature, the story of his second act. A decade after he became shorthand for American greed by raising the price of a life-saving pill by 5,000 percent, Shkreli is trying to build a new identity as Wall Street’s loudest short-seller, a role that lets him do the thing he has always done best, which is make people furious while insisting he is the only honest man in the room.

From Pariah to Public Short-Seller

Shkreli has spent the better part of the past year building a public trading persona around shorting stocks that retail investors love and Wall Street distrusts, according to Bloomberg, which reported this week that he is angling for a presidential pardon at the same time.

The pattern is now familiar. He picks a meme-adjacent stock, often one riding a wave of retail enthusiasm or hype about a new technology, announces a short position on social media, then hosts a livestream laying out his thesis to whoever tunes in. He has taken this approach to Opendoor Technologies, the iBuying real estate company, and to Beyond Meat, whose shares he shorted even as they were in the middle of a short squeeze that had already sent them up more than 900 percent from their lows.

He has also gone after an entire sector at once. Over the past year Shkreli built short positions across quantum computing stocks including IonQ, D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing and Quantum Computing Inc., arguing the group’s rally was detached from any near-term commercial reality.

SHKRELI’S RECENT TARGETS
Opendoor Technologies	Shorted at $9.36; called it “an obvious short”
Beyond Meat	Shorted mid short-squeeze rally
Quantum stocks (IONQ, QBTS, RGTI, QUBT)	Called the rally a “bubble”
aTyr Pharma	Predicted an 80 percent drop in six weeks
Capricor Therapeutics	Co-authored a 46-page bear report before a trial readout

Some of those bets have worked spectacularly. Others have blown up in his face just as publicly, which is arguably the point. When the quantum trade briefly turned against him, he did not go quiet.

“I’m pretty fkin’ far from okay.”
Martin Shkreli, on X, as his quantum short squeezed against him

It is a strange kind of transparency. Most short-sellers work quietly, disclosing positions only when required and building their case in research notes read by other professionals. Shkreli narrates the whole process in real time, wins, losses, tantrums included, to an audience that seems to enjoy watching him sweat almost as much as it enjoys watching him gloat.

Angling for Clemency

The comeback has a second track. As speculation swirled in Washington over a possible batch of clemency grants tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary, Shkreli filed his own petition, telling the Washington Examiner he deliberately avoided hiring one of the well-connected consultants now charging six and seven figures to shepherd petitions to the president.

“I can be my own advocate. I don’t need somebody who will boldly claim that they can get it into the president’s hands.”
Martin Shkreli, to the Washington Examiner

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has reportedly filed a petition of her own, and the two have taken to sparring about it online, a reunion of sorts between two of the most notorious white-collar defendants of the past decade. Shkreli was convicted in 2017 of securities fraud and conspiracy tied to hedge funds he ran years before Daraprim ever made headlines, sentenced to seven years, and released in 2022. He remains barred from serving as an officer of a public company, which is part of why shorting stocks, rather than running one, has become his preferred stage.

Why the Hatred Never Faded

To understand why Shkreli still draws this much attention, and this much venom, it helps to remember how the nickname was earned. In 2015, as chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, he raised the price of Daraprim, a decades-old drug used by patients with toxoplasmosis, including many with weakened immune systems, from $13.50 a pill to $750 overnight. The backlash was immediate and unusually personal.

The BBC catalogued some of the epithets that followed him online at the time, among them a “morally bankrupt sociopath” and “everything that is wrong with capitalism,” descriptions that stuck to him long after the price hike itself became old news.

What made the reaction so durable, rather than a one-week outrage cycle, was Shkreli’s refusal to perform contrition. Other executives caught in pricing scandals apologize, or disappear. Shkreli smirked through congressional testimony, pleaded the Fifth, and mocked lawmakers on social media afterward. Prosecutors reportedly struggled to seat an impartial jury for his eventual fraud trial because so many potential jurors already despised him, even though that trial had nothing to do with drug pricing at all.

Business ethics researchers have long pointed to that combination, real harm paired with visible, unrepentant enjoyment of the outrage, as the thing that separates a scandal from a folk villain. A price increase alone rarely produces a national hate figure. A price increase followed by public relish in the anger it caused does.

Shkreli himself has pushed back on the entire framing. In a podcast interview earlier this year with entrepreneur James Altucher, he argued that the patients taking Daraprim never felt the price increase directly, since insurance and patient assistance programs absorbed most of it, and that the loudest critics were never the drug’s actual customers.

“When a journalist writes a headline like that, they are not reporting facts, they are telling you what to think.”
Martin Shkreli, paraphrasing his view of the “most hated man” label, on the James Altucher Show

It is a version of events that leaves out a great deal, including the securities fraud conviction and the specifics of how Daraprim’s price was set. But it is also, in its way, consistent with everything else about Shkreli’s public life: a genuine belief that the backlash was manufactured by people who needed a villain, and that he simply agreed to play the part more loudly than anyone expected.

A Villain Who Won’t Go Quiet

That willingness to lean into the role, rather than run from it, is precisely what makes his second act as a short-seller work as spectacle even when the trades themselves do not work. A hedge fund manager who quietly shorts a hyped biotech stock is doing his job. Shkreli doing it, narrating it, losing money on it in public, and then joking about how far from okay he is, turns an ordinary trade into content. His enemies get to keep hating him. His fans get to keep watching. And Shkreli, whether the position is up or down on any given day, gets exactly what he has always wanted most: everyone’s attention, all at once.

Back at his apartment, the livestream chat scrolls past faster than anyone could read it, a mix of insults and admiration that Shkreli seems to treat as functionally the same thing. He moves another chess piece. Somewhere, a stock he has bet against is either climbing or falling. Either way, by morning, he will have posted about it.

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