“I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but I liken myself to the robber barons.” So says Martin Shkreli, the 32-year-old hedge-fund manager turned pharmaceutical-company C.E.O., who achieved instantaneous notoriety last fall when he acquired the U.S. rights to a lifesaving drug and promptly boosted its price over 5,000 percent, from $13.50 a tablet to $750. The tsunami of rage (the BBC asked if Shkreli was “the most hated man in America”) only got worse when Shkreli said he would lower the price—and then didn’t. An anonymous user on the Web site Reddit summed up the sentiment bluntly: “Just fucking die will you?”

“The attempt to public shame is interesting,” says Shkreli. “Because everything we’ve done is legal. [Standard Oil tycoon John D.] Rockefeller made no attempt to apologize as long as what he was doing was legal.” In fact, Shkreli says, he wishes he had raised the price higher. “My investors expect me to maximize profits,” he said in an interview in early December at the Forbes Healthcare Summit, after which Forbes contributor Dan Diamond summed up Shkreli as “fascinating, horrifying, and utterly compelling.”

The drug at the center of the uproar, Dara­prim, is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines because it treats toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that is particularly dangerous to pregnant women, people with compromised immune systems, and the elderly. In that vulnerable population it can lead to seizures, blindness, birth defects in babies of infected mothers, and, in some cases, death. For decades, there wasn’t any competition to Daraprim for the simple reason that there wasn’t much money to be made selling it. In the face of his humongous price hike, the obvious solution is for someone to undercut his price—especially since Dara­prim is fairly simple to make—but thanks to the complex rules governing drug sales in the U.S., that’s not so easy. A potential competitor would have to go through the arduous process of getting approval from the Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.) by showing that its drug is equivalent to Dara­prim. This is difficult, because Shkreli’s company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, tightly controls its distribution, making it hard to get the samples to do testing.

Since it is campaign season, Shkreli became Public Enemy Number One. “The drastic price increase will have a direct impact on patients’ ability to purchase their needed medications,” wrote Senator Bernie Sanders in a letter to Shkreli while launching an investigation into the price increase. (Shkreli, in turn, sent Sanders a $2,700 campaign donation, which the senator gave to a healthcare clinic.) Hillary Clinton tweeted that “price gouging like this is … outrageous” and promised to fix the problem if elected president. “Politics are well past logic. It’s entertainment,” says Shkreli. No less an authority than Donald Trump said that Shkreli “looks like a spoiled brat.”

“My parents were immigrants and janitors,” Shkreli says. “[Trump] inherited wealth! Fuck him. And I thought we could be friends.”

Beyond the rhetoric, his move tapped into a growing panic that health care in America is becoming unaffordable. One apparent solution, price controls on drugs, practiced in a number of other countries, is the pharmaceutical industry’s greatest fear, and so Clinton’s tweet helped wipe out billions of dollars in market capitalization of pharmaceutical stocks. The industry tried to mitigate the damage by disavowing Turing, but the problem is that, while Shkreli’s behavior may seem egregious, he is far from alone: using F.D.A. restrictions meant to protect consumers in order to hike prices of drugs has become a well-known and highly profitable business strategy.

Although Shkreli is a minor part of a much bigger issue, every morality play needs a villain, and, oh, what a perfect villain he is. He is an avid user of social media, where he relishes portraying himself as a wealthy young hedge-fund guy. He tweets obnoxious snapshots of labels of $1,000-plus bottles of wine like 1982 Lafite-Rothschild, along with selfies inside a helicopter buzzing over Manhattan or posed next to a life-size chess set by a pool in the Hamptons. In one tweet, he linked to a video of Eminem’s “The Way I Am,” which goes, “I’m not Mr. Friendly, I can be a prick . . . I don’t mean to be mean but all I can be is just me.”