After purchasing a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album for $2 million in 2015, disgraced “Pharma Bro” Martin Shrkeli recently put the album up for auction on eBay as a result of the backlash he received since purchasing the rare project. In a shocking turn of events, Bloomberg spoke with several Clan associates who revealed that Shkreli’s expensive double-album might not even be an actual Clan release after all.
According to Killa Sin, a Wu-Tang affiliate, the album was initially presented to him as a project for Moroccan producer Cilvaringz. “The way he presented it was it was going to be basically his album, and he wanted me to do some work for him,” Sin told Bloomberg. Domingo Neris, the manager of Wu-Tang member U-God, shared the same sentiment saying, “It’s not an authorized Wu-Tang Clan album.”
Shkreli purchased the album under the condition that he can not sell it for 88 years, but previously previewed a few tracks off the unreleased effort. In his eBay listing, Shkreli admitted that he hasn’t “carefully listened to the album.”
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James Ellis, manager of Method Man, also provided his account to Bloomberg and revealed that Method Man’s verses were intended for Cilvaringz’s album, not a Wu-Tang effort. “How it became a Wu-Tang album from there? We have no knowledge of that,” Ellis said.
Bloomberg contacted Shkreli for comments on the situation, to which the former pharmaceutical exec responded: ““hahahahahahahahahahahaha,” before calling the business publication an ” overpriced, legacy software system that subsidizes a money-losing media company.” Shkreli, 34, earned notoriety for raising the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent and is currently facing prison time over a fraud conviction; a judge revoked his bail this week after he offered Facebook followers $5,000 for a lock of Hillary Clinton’s hair.
Read Bloomberg’s full report here.