Remember how the Wu-Tang Clan announced a secret album that’s being released as a single copy and will be toured around the world like a piece of art before being auctioned off for somewhere “in the millions”?

Well, the world tour never happened, but Once Upon A Time In Shaolin – a 31-track double LP that was recorded in secret over two decades – certainly did and it was sold for a reported $2 million just a few months back.

At the time members of the Wu-Tang declined to reveal who in fact had purchased the record, citing privacy concerns.

Enter Martin Shkreli. You may remember his name from a few months ago too, although for entirely different reasons.

Shkreli, a 32-year-old former hedge fund manager and founder of Turing Pharmaceuticals, made headlines for hiking the price of Daraprim, a 62-year-old drug used for treating parasitic infections, from $13.50 to $750 a tablet.

Daraprim is commonly used to treat people with compromised immune systems, such as AIDS and cancer patients.

Shkreli’s price gouging has seen him come under fire from social media, the medical community, and bands signed to Collect Records after it became known that Shkreli was a major investor in the label.

He was subsequently labelled by the BBC as “the most hated man in America”, a label he seems to wear with pride.

See Shkreli heard about Once Upon a Time in Shaolin too and thought it would be nice to own, convinced that if he bought it he would have the opportunity to rub shoulders with celebrities and rappers who would want to hear it.

So he bought it, and the deal closed about the same time as the price-gouging controversy picked up steam.

“I was a little worried that they were going to walk out of the deal,” he told Bloomberg. “But by then we’d closed. The whole kind of thing since then has been just kind of ‘Well, do we want to announce it’s him? Do we not want to announce it’s him?’ I think they were trying to cover their butts a little bit.”

Unfortunately, drunk on the power that money gouged from AIDs patients delivers, Shkreli has now decided to treat musicians with what can only be described as the douchiest attitude that could very well earn him the moniker of “the most hated man in music” too.

See Shkreli now wants more artists to make private albums for him. Why?

Well firstly he believe that “you should have to take and pass a test to buy music. We dont value artists in today’s society and the consumerism of music is destroying it”.

Secondly, he believes that “at the right price these guys [musicians] basically will do anything” after it was revealed he hire Fetty Wap to perform a private concert for him.

But if his dance-monkey-dance attitude towards musicians doesn’t grate on you, perhaps it’s tweets such as these that will tip you over the edge.

Now for sure, Shkreli is a grade-A troll, and he’s also free to do as he wishes with his money. But that doesn’t mean we have to like him for it.

Worse still, he hasn’t even listened to Once Upon a Time in Shaolin yet.

“I could be convinced to listen to it earlier if Taylor Swift wants to hear it or something like that,” Shkreli says. “But for now, I think I’m going to kind of save it.”

Apparently he’s saving that for a time when he’s feeling low – because apparently making money out of the misfortunes of AIDs patients isn’t low enough.

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