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Shkreli's youtube streams on finance were always pretty interesting and if you omit is trollish behavior, he generally was very respectable and seemed to enjoy teaching people about medicine, mathematics and finance. The videos are available online and I think reflect a different personality than the one he presented in public.
I watched one of his finance videos and it was oddly entertaining and very interesting. He was clearly very smart. Sort of sad he wasted his talents.
What makes you think he wasted them? He made people money and helped the sick. Unfortunately he's being punished for his methods.
I vaguely recall that his investors actually made money - he lied to them, but actually made them money....
His legal team said that, but of course that doesn't mean he didn't commit fraud. As I understand it, he took money from his pharmaceutical company to cover up trading losses in his fund. The fact that investors all made money doesn't change a)that this is almost certainly criminal in and of itself if you don't 100% own both the fund and the company b)pharma investors would have made more money had he not taken some of their cash and given it to investors in his fund.

Edit: And of course reporting requirements. If you're investing with other people's money, you don't get to make a huge loss just disappear and not tell people about it. There are a bunch of laws about that sort of thing.

not saying that he didn't defraud his investors - just pointing out that I was under the impression that his fraud did not economically harm his investors (which is rarely the case in these prosecutions) and puts his sentence in a different light to a certain extent...