Martin Shkreli is selling his Wu-Tang album, possibly so that he can buy Hillary Clinton's hair
The supervillaining of Martin Shkreli took another step toward elaborate underground bases and plots to kill Superman this week, with MarketWatch reporting that the recently convicted “pharma bro”/would-be Voldemort has placed his one-of-a-kind copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon A Time In Shaolin on eBay, possibly as part of an elaborate plot to buy Hillary Clinton’s hair. We’re aware that that’s a very weird sentence, but it’s pretty on-brand for Shkreli, a guy who’s reached the point where he’ll do essentially anything to stay in the public eye.
Shkreli—who was convicted last month on one charge of fraud, and several unofficial counts of “looking like a snake” and “disrespecting the Wu-Tang Clan”—put the album up for auction last night, claiming that he’d donate half of the proceeds to “medical research.” (He paid $2 million for the only copy of Shaolin back in 2015.) But when a reporter called him to confirm what that vague phrasing actually meant, Shkreli reportedly “unleashed a string of expletives and then requested to engage in a lewd act with a reporter,” so it’s not clear if “medical research” means donations to his own companies, or actual charity, or an attempt to clone Hillary Clinton from her hair.
Okay, so, the hair thing: On Monday night, Shkreli posted on his Facebook—a collection of bragging, random internet jokes, and wannabe edgelord political shit-posting—that he was offering a $5,000 bounty to anyone who could bring him a piece of Clinton’s hair. (This came after a series of posts where he joked (?) about Clinton being some sort of Biblical serpent that he might possibly want to clone.) Unsurprisingly, a convicted criminal paying people to touch a former first lady and presidential candidate caught the attention of the Secret Service, who apparently visited Shkreli for a brief talking-to. He later updated his post with a note that it was “satire, meant for humor and not an endorsement of violence against a truly wonderful public servant,” and now seems to have deleted the bounty entirely.
In any case, Shkreli—whose auction for the Wu-Tang clan album is currently up to $200,000, and includes notes saying he never actually bothered to listen to the damn thing—has once again won his private little game, which is to say he successfully unleashed a one-two punch of oddity so potent that we were unable to follow Paul Anka’s time-honored, guaranteed advice for dealing with internet trolls:
(Guarantee void, as ever, in Tennessee.)
[via CNBC]