All-In · 3 min instead of 25 min · Oct 12, 2026
How he bought neglected drugs cheap and repositioned them
Martin Shkreli
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.”
Takeaways
- Big pharma sold drug rights worth far more for around a million dollars
- The bottleneck was vetting assets, so he built NLP to read papers and patents
- Sparsentan moved from a sleepy hypertension market to FSGS, which had no approved drug
In this episode
Full episode- 1:45Quantum computing has one real trick and no business case2:41
8:30How he bought neglected drugs cheap and repositioned them2:32
- 22:22Why gifted people self-destruct trying to live up to an image1:39Up next