In 2015, the former pharmaceutical executive and unrepentant drug price hiker Martin Shkreli used $2 million worth of his ill-gotten gains to buy the sole copy of an unreleased Wu-Tang Clan album called Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Now, Shkreli was ordered to turn over any copies of the album he has in his possession after the judge ruled that he broke the terms of the purchasing agreement.
In 2017, a jury found Shkreli guilty of securities fraud, and the government forced him to sell the album to a collective of cryptocurrency enthusiasts called PleasrDAO for $4.75 million. After all, it is considered to be the rarest record in the world. But the collective says that the album’s uniqueness was ruined when Shkreli allegedly breached the terms of the agreement by making digital copies of it, keeping some for himself, distributing it to others, then playing portions of it on a livestream on X.
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The album itself was recorded in secret between 2007 and 2013. The Wu-Tang Clan pressed only one two-disk copy in 2014 and squirreled it away in a vault in the Royal Mansour Hotel in Casablanca, Morocco, until Shkreli bought it at an auction in 2015. As part of the purchasing agreement with the Wu-Tang Clan, Shkreli agreed to not make the album commercially available until the year 2103.
Presumably, that agreement is still in place now that it is in the hands of PleasrDAO. The collective held a public exhibition of the album in June 2024 at the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, at which point they began selling partial ownership of the album as a $1 NFT. So far, they’ve only sold about $350,000 worth.
It’s been quite the journey. Now, on August 26, a federal judge ordered Shkreli to turn over all copies of the album he had in his possession. He has until September 30 to provide a list of everyone he shared the album with, provide an account of every copy he’s made, and account for every dollar they earn from it. (The livestream had a reported 5,000 listeners.)
PleasrDAO’s legal team considers this a win, while Shkreli’s team says it’s a neutral move with no winners. But in the battle between Pharma Bro and crypto bro, of course, there are no winners. We all lose.
