Martin Shkreli's combative 2015 Reddit AMA

In September 2015, Martin Shkreli, then the chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, became one of the most reviled figures in the United States after his company acquired Daraprim — a decades-old drug used to treat infections dangerous to people with HIV and other immune conditions — and raised its price overnight from $13.50 to $750 per pill. The move turned Shkreli into a symbol of pharmaceutical price-gouging and earned him the tabloid label 'the most hated man in America.'

On 26 October 2015, with that controversy at its peak, Shkreli held a Reddit AMA. Rather than offering contrition, he was combative and at times flippant, defending the price increase as standard industry practice and treating much of the hostile questioning with bravado — at one point claiming, as outlets including NextShark and Mashable reported, that his notoriety had improved his romantic life. The session attracted thousands of comments, the overwhelming majority of them critical, and contemporaneous reporting noted that the AMA accumulated a strongly negative score.

The AMA crystallized a particular kind of Reddit spectacle: a deeply unpopular figure voluntarily stepping into an open forum and using it less to persuade than to provoke. Where a typical crisis-management strategy would counsel caution, Shkreli leaned into the role of villain, and the community responded in kind. Coverage treated the session as a textbook example of how not to use the format — and, simultaneously, as a revealing window into Shkreli's deliberate cultivation of his own infamy.

The episode sat within a much larger story. Shkreli was later arrested in December 2015 on unrelated securities-fraud charges tied to his earlier hedge-fund and pharmaceutical ventures, and in 2017 he was convicted and sentenced to prison. His Reddit AMA is often recalled as an early, self-authored chapter of a public persona that he continued to perform across social media until he was banned from various platforms.

For Reddit's history of AMAs, the Shkreli session stands out as one of the clearest demonstrations that the format does not require a participant to want to be liked. It is frequently cited alongside other 'disaster' AMAs, but with an asterisk: unlike figures who stumbled into hostility, Shkreli appeared to court it deliberately, making his AMA as much a performance as a misfire.