A club event that was to feature convicted Baruch College alumnus Martin Shkreli as a speaker was canceled at Brooklyn Technical High School.
The event, which was supposed to be held by the Brooklyn Tech Crypto Club, was scheduled for Jan. 9. But the club announced in an Instagram story that the appearance of Shkreli, a former hedge fund manager and drug company executive, was “indefinitely postponed” by the New York City Department of Education, adding that the event was seen as a “bad PR risk.”
Students and staff at the school were welcomed to meet Shkreli and listen for “insights into finance,” artificial intelligence and the pharmaceutical industry, according to an event flyer posted on Instagram.
Shkreli, who attended Hunter College High School, described Brooklyn Tech as one of his “crosstown rivals growing up” and said he had “fond memories of talking to the brightest kids in NYC” in a Jan. 8 post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The comment was made in response to a media request from Noah Krisch, a wealth and power reporter at The Daily Beast. In the post, Shkreli also told the reporter to “lick my balls.”
Within two hours of the post being shared, the event was canceled by the Department of Education.
“In response, Shkreli said on X that he “will host a parade in brooklyn on a harambe float in front of the DoE building,” adding that “some 16 [year olds] won’t be able to get the event they wanted.”
Later, he sent private messages to Krisch, which were shared as screenshots on X, noting that there are plans to reschedule the meeting off campus.
He told the reporter that he was “not mad” as “less work for [him] is better.”
“I like having fans but I don’t want to do work for them because I am lazy,” he added. “So it would be good if it was cancelled, but I think we will do it somewhere else, which is bad for me, because I am lazy as I said earlier in this quote.”
“I believe that this infringes on our freedoms of speech, expression and learning,” the club’s president wrote in the Jan. 9 Instagram story, as reported by the New York Post.
Shkreli was known to run Turing Pharmaceuticals, which acquired and raised the price of the AIDS medication Daraprim by 5,000% in 2015. He was later sentenced to a seven-year prison sentence in 2017 for fraud and banned from the pharmaceutical industry.
He was released from prison early in May 2022 on good behavior and has since tried to appeal his ban.
Editor’s Note: Martin Shkreli, who is mentioned in this article, is a former business editor of The Ticker.
