I present you with One Internet.
(Seriously, as you say, they are not immutable and not always efficient in value creation)
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someday when you are wealthy enough, you can afford to use actual bunnies, ducks, and puppies! 
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Apparently his company has been working on a vaccine for empathy and compassion, the internal testing is showing promising results.
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I am toying with a concept for modular chem fab labs; microreactors, pumps, separation systems, various spectrometers for online control of the production, leverage of nanocatalysts and emerging laser, microwave/plasma, and ultrasound methods (you can get amazing energy densities with even fairly low power if you operate in a cubic millimeter). (The spectrometers are the crucial part.) With easy to replicate (3d printing? laser milling?) parts.
That way, anybody could set up a fab system for production of more or less any not-too-complicated molecules, with off-the-shelf materials, and possibly OTC meds, as feedstock.
Like a dripping faucet can waste a lot of water, dripping the precursors through a microreactor can produce enough of what we need over time - and if we need more we can parallelize the reactors easily.
The spectrometers themselves would be grossly useful for making sure that stuff bought over the Net really contains what we paid for, that the fingerprints fit with known-good samples. Risk of using unofficial markets would therefore plunge.
No more pharma-monopolies.
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Isnāt the particular problem here that so few patients take the drug in question that, even if each pill is thousands of dollars, itās still not much of an incentive for a competitor to retool his factory?
The free market only addresses profitable health problems. It is not, as they say, a panacea.
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There are fairly to immensely high barriers to entry. Which make many otherwise obvious approaches not worth the cost.
Thatās why I advocate for the bottom-up approach, to get the technology so accessible that one can cook up the meds for self or a friend/relative with relative ease, without the paperwork hoops, for the cost (including the hardware setup) of fraction of what the official market would ask.
Heās definitely shaping up to be a top candidate for a free winter vacation on Svalbard. Without shoes. Aaaand no guns.
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āHeās confirmed his membership in the sinister cult of fiduciary duty ā¦ā
This excellent phrase in the original post expresses so much about the issue of whether the demonstrated (or professed or felt) morality of corporate fiduciaries makes the economy more democratic or plutocratic.
The legal and practical reality is that corporate fiduciaries generally lack sufficient discretion to make sustainable, meaningful net contributions to a democratically administered economy.
Mr. Shkeli is saying and doing ā almost compulsively ā what corporate fiduciaries are generally under a legally-binding, fiduciary obligation to do, which is increase share price, externalize costs, increase market share and/or ROI (increasingly short term).
If a fiduciary acts against these legal duties she faces risk of removal and civil ā sometimes criminal ā liabilty.
And for fiduciary professionals advising the officers and executives (e.g. lawyers), resisting fiduciary duties that conflict with duties of conscience risks ethics complaints and losing income needed to service debt on a $1/4 million student loan with a noncompetitive interest rate ā to say nothing of mortgage, family support or other obligations.
Some could argue that Mr. Shrkreliās background story as a too-hungry, too ruthless, suspiciously successful and inexplicably-wealthy-despite-repeated-failures climber may feed a narrative that rehabilitates the plutocratic corporate privatize-social-gain-and-socialize-private-loss model.
But isnāt the real insight his (apparently) proud membership in a fiduciary ācultā too overwhelming and traumatic in its implications for many of us to always acknowledge consciously?
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Honestly, the deciding factor for me in the 2016 election will probably be whichever candidate pledges to set this man on fire on national TV.
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I was just doing my job!
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say: āShareholderā and everybody drops to their knees. What is this black magic?
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May he forever be know as the Douche of Fidouchery Doody, aka āthe Fidoucheā.
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Soooo, how soon till my Culture-grade drug glands then?
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Itās the only boss of the CEO, basically. As Hello_friends said above, the CEO is compelled to increase shareholder value in a way that no other employee of the company is, and that puts them in positions that a normal person would find objectionable. I think itās something we should probably look to address legally, because otherwise weāre just not understanding what keeps producing these sociopathic CEOs and itāll keep happening.
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FACT: It was Martin Shkreli who originally inspired the design of Tony Starkās āHulkbusterā armor.
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But that isnāt really true. Many board members pretend that it is true, but it just isnāt. Term sheets for pre ipo companies are different, and for post ipo you can have bothersome activist investorsā¦
But a CEO for a public company isnāt beholden to shareholder value more than they are to making customers happy and hiring the best talent.
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A communal shared illusion in how to build value in a company. I think shaddack has the exact chemical formula scrawled on an old, dirty napkin somewhere.
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The Germans have a word for it.
Backpfeifengesicht:
A face badly in need of a fist.
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I love the German language more and more each day. What donāt they have a word for?
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Culture? What reference is this?
As of built-in custom-function organs, Iād bet on convergence of 3d printing of organs from cellular suspension (those little critters can apparently self-organize in some cases, so just put a mixture of them into the proper shape and they will migrate to the appropriate layers on their own), and CRISPR for gene modding. Take whatās close enough, add the synth pathways you borrowed from something else, add some way to regulate (ideally consciously via some nerves, the tech to use may be available from advanced prosthetics and neuroprosthetics).
