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All-In · 3 min · Oct 12, 2026

How he bought neglected drugs cheap and repositioned them

Martin Shkreli

Started hedge fund MSMB and drugmaker Retrophin, raised Daraprim's price 56-fold at Turing and was convicted of securities fraud in 2017.

  • Chamath PalihapitiyaHost · Founder & CEO, Social Capital

    Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq.

  • Jason CalacanisHost · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH

    Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups.

  • David SacksHost · Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures

    PayPal's first COO, founded Yammer; White House AI & crypto czar 2025–26.

  • David FriedbergHost · CEO, Ohalo

    Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.

About this segment

Shkreli explains why the market for drug molecules was inefficient, with big pharma selling assets for almost nothing. He walks through repurposing Sparsentan from hypertension to the rare kidney disease FSGS.

From “Martin Shkreli: Big Pharma's Blind Spot, Betting Against Quantum & What Prison Taught Him”, Oct 12, 2026. Watch the full episode

“Pfizer would sell you a drug for a million bucks that was worth a billion dollars. They didn't care.”
Martin Shkreliat 9:06 · All-In9:06

Takeaways

  1. Big pharma sold drug rights worth far more for around a million dollars
  2. The bottleneck was vetting assets, so he built NLP to read papers and patents
  3. Sparsentan moved from a sleepy hypertension market to FSGS, which had no approved drug
Watch 2:32 from 8:30

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 1:45Quantum computing has one real trick and no business case2:41

  2. 8:30How he bought neglected drugs cheap and repositioned them2:32

  3. 22:22Why gifted people self-destruct trying to live up to an image1:39Up next

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 8:34

    And loving stocks, loving investing. Bill Gates was my hero. And I found a way to, you know, get into that. And Kramer one day pointed at me and said, genomics, you're going to look at genomics. And I said, okay. And it was a lot of fun. And I went to a Tiger Cub. I started my own fund. I realized I was a much better entrepreneur and private equity guy than a trader. We found that the marketplace for molecules had huge amounts of alpha, whereas the marketplace at public companies, we could buy a drug from, I bought a drug from Dusselmeyer's for $2 million.

  2. 9:03

    And that same company is public today. It's worth $6 billion. So that was my first startup. And it was a really inefficient market. Pfizer would sell you a drug for a million bucks that was worth a billion dollars. They didn't care. Sell you the rights to the drugs. You can productize it, price it. Yeah, absolutely. I'm sorry. What do you mean? you just knock on Pfizer's door and they're like, take what you'd like for a million dollars.

  3. 9:23

    We saw this and we built two very similar companies that our biggest constraint was finding people to vet these assets. So I started a small NLP. Clinically. Yeah, just reading papers, reading patents, going to universities and small drug companies and big drug companies, making relationships. It's called business development in our field. And our biggest bandwidth problem was reading these papers. So I started a small NLP, company on the side in 2015. We had Watson. It was great. And we tried to read every, it wasn't great. We tried to read every paper that was published in medicine. It was 40 million papers.

  4. 9:59

    And having humans do that is a really tough thing. How do you take a molecule and flip it from 25 million to six? But what are you doing in that six or nine months that you own it? I think, so what I did with Sparsantan, a drug that I named and is now FDA approved, now a blockbuster drug, is Bristol discovered and developed it for hypertension, which is sort of a dead, sleepy market that nobody really needs.

  5. 10:22

    Hypertension, high blood pressure. Yeah. And so we moved into a disease called FSGS, which is a disease that never has had a drug approved for it. So you sort of try to angle it in a way that makes sense. And in that case, the drug got FDA approved. 30,000 people who have focal segmental glomerulosclerosis and never had a drug before now have a drug. I can be a good guy too. and I think the you know that that was you know it's the art of that field it's a great way to make a billion dollars it's is this what Royalty Pharma does?

  6. 10:51

    Royvan but is this also what Royalty Pharma does they'll come in yeah Royalty's a bit of a different player genius guys obviously their big claim to fame was they went to NYU but was getting this