It's a fascinating story... the key element of which, in the public mind, is that Shkreli ACTUALLY " raised the price more than 55-fold for Daraprim in September from $13.50 per pill to $750"... with the entire difference in price being pure profit for his company and his investors.
ZEN holders should be so lucky. Meanwhile, back in the frozen northland, ZEN is only PRETENDING to be similarly able to make lots and lots of money by touting their similarly outrageous pricing of graphite at $10,000 per tonne or more... which, instead of that meaning that massive profits will be rolling in soon... instead has it appear it will cost ZEN even more than that just to produce the stuff ? Oops.
Now it looks like ZEN won't even be able to turn a profit... even with that exorbitant pricing they've touted... while pricing their products at a higher price that would perhaps make them a lot of money... seems it prices them right out of the market ? ZEN would make a lot more economic sense if their deposit were exposed at the surface, making it cheap to mine. However, it isn't. Nothing that you have to dig for two years just to reach... is really likely to make any economic sense relative to other alternatives that you won't have to dig two years to reach.
Shkreli's success in feeding his greed is based on having a plan that is feasible... that he's already made work. ZEN's similar greed... for big profits based on $10K per tonne for graphite... seems it isn't actually feasible.
The greed of Shkreli attracts public attention now because he actually wins those massive profits for his investors... and isn't very skillful in deflecting the attention that creates... while the similar greed of the ZEN promoters seems it really depends for its reward on conning fools into thinking the high prices being touted really mean ZEN investors will be making that same kind of big money as Shkreli's, that will have them rolling in the same kind of profits... rather than needing to spend that kind of big money just to make the stuff... while still not making a profit, even at that ridiculous pricing.
The money I see that is being made in ZEN... is being made by selling the shares, not by selling graphite... and not by doing a good job advancing the potentials. That makes ZEN look a lot more like Shkreli's FIRST (failed) business ventures... the one's for which he's being charged with fraud now... rather than looking like the highly profitable ventures that he's put together more recently.
Shkreli's experience suggests that ZEN's obvious failure to thrive... while not getting anywhere close to the marks touted in the planning stages, or in the promotion efforts that drove the price of the stock way beyond reason... still suggests that ZEN insiders, at least, can buck up, and shake it off... as Shkreli shows that even having a couple of abject failures in a row doesn't mean that you won't ever be able to figure it out, and perhaps they might get it right on the next try ?
Of course, in the case of the massively over-hyped expectations generated for ZEN... it won't really work out. And, if you lose your ass investing in ZEN you probably already know well enough that you can't count on ZEN to bother with trying to make you good, later ?
I'm not going to try to validate or justify Shkreli's errors, where he's clearly crossed the lines in the law... paying off some of his prior investors losses using the new money raised from others... and, my guess is that they'll make the charges stick (the key point of which now really seems to be about the government vultures stepping in now, only well after the fact was made obvious, with a plan to impose fines and penalties that will have them take away the $ in damages that would otherwise be paid out to the investors who've already filed lawsuits against him for the same acts)... but, you got to at least respect the guy for thinking of his original investors as more than disposable "muppets"... which is all you should expect current ZEN investors will ever be considered to be, when ZEN folds its tent.
The real point being missed in the recent articles I found...
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-martin-shkreli-securities-fraud/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/business/shkreli-fraud-charges.html?smtyp=cur&_r=0
...is that the things Shkreli has been doing recently are exactly what the recent changes made in the laws in regard to "orphan drugs" were INTENDED to enable. The changes made in the law want and intend exactly that result... to generate huge, out-sized profits from small market drugs... that will divert money from the deep pockets of insurance companies to those doing R&D work on drugs intended for treating small market diseases which otherwise have markets that are far too small to attract ANY investment capital to doing research. What seems it is driving the outrage re Shkreli is only two things: first, his attitude... and then, that his successes show that someone other than the biggest drug companies has actually figured out what the law really enables, and really intends to enable... and is exploiting what the law allows and intends... in exactly the same way as all the other big drug companies are doing, only, the others are all paying to AVOID the sort of press coverage he's generating... while he is wallowing in it, and sloshing a lot of mud around.
Odds are that Shkreli's less than charming "PR skills"... are generating far too much business risk for all the other drug companies making similarly big bank off of the same outrageous drug/insurance pricing scam that our health care system has been converted into... so, they're using what they can, in what they have, to try to take him out of the game... before people begin to get smart and get pissed off about what the law enables, and intends to enable... instead of only being pissed off about "that one guy's greed and his bad attitude".
Another parallel there, with ZEN, of course... as the other players in the graphite market space are similarly concerned with ZEN's flagrant excesses in their flamingly obvious "promotion effort" poisoning the well for many far more legitimate... actually feasible... market potentials.
The rest, of course... is that none of what was written about Shkreli that I found... pointed toward him ever being proven wrong about, or behaving improperly in regard to, any of the stocks he'd deemed legitimately worthy of shorting. Being right... doesn't make him a bad guy ?
The bigger story there... is that although he was apparently quite successful in trading his short picks... he never started making the really big bucks until after he got channeled into the groove on the long side of running a scam... which is still true enough, it seems, even when the long side scams he's running for big profits now... are ones that are made FULLY LEGAL... BY DESIGN. They don't want you to notice that fact... that obvious scams have been legitimized... so, they're trying desperately to take him out, now, before you do notice.
The same set of lessons Shkreli's is having applied... seem that they apply as well to ZEN: The worst thing that can happen in any similar effort in promotion... is to succeed too well in a promotion that appears it isn't fully kosher... and then call way too much attention to yourself as a result of excess in your success...
ZEN and Shkreli both look like "winners"... in the sense of both failing in that same way... even though only Shkreli actually made it to the winners circle ?
ZEN at $5 or more... based on... what ? That looks to me like nothing other than too obvious hubris succeeding far too well in inducing the madness of crowds, based on nothing other than the susceptible "wanting to believe" in fairly stories coming true. ZEN... turns out not to be capable of magic in levitating like Peter Pan ? And the big G... often seen flitting about sprinkling something around... is not really Tinkerbell ? And, it turns out it's not really sparkley magic dust they've been spreading around... rather than something a bit more... organic ?
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