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The December arrest of smirking embodiment of unbridled avarice Martin Shkreli on charges of securities fraud was a terrible thing—at least for Martin Shkreli. (The rest of us seemed to get a kick out of it.) But if there’s a platinum lining to this whole situation, it‘s that, now that he’s tangled with the FBI, Shkreli finally has the street cred necessary to drop his mixtape.


Although he used to be more of a pop-punk and emo kind of a guy, his recent experiences with fame, ill-gotten wealth, and haters trying to bring him down just because he’s toying with the lives of vulnerable populations like some sort of Lacoste-clad feudal lord have apparently given Shkreli a new appreciation for hip-hop. Mere weeks before his arrest, Shkreli was revealed to be the buyer of an insanely expensive (and potentially not very good) one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan record, for which he paid $2 million. But although he’s been threatening to release an album for a while, now that he’s done hard time—by which we mean posted $5 million bail and was released—Shkreli finally has something worth rapping about:

I may or may not be dropping a mix tape on Wednesday. #staytuned — Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) January 17, 2016

And now that he’s spitting fire with his—in his mind, one assumes—best friend RZA, Shkreli would like for you to stop referring to him as the “pharma bro,” please. (Maybe it’s scaring away all his Tinder matches?) In an interview with Good Day New York’s Steve Lacy, Shkreli says, “I’m not a ‘pharma bro’, right?,” and explains that the infamous picture of him wearing sunglasses standing in front of a TV playing a Flo Rida video that inspired the nickname was supposed to be “ironic.” He goes on to call the FBI’s case “fictitious,” and that, although the media has painted him as “the most hated man in the world,” the handful of people who tune in to his daily live streams on YouTube are all pretty cool. So, MC Weak Stream, then?


[via Mashable]