Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin’ Album Bought by Turing CEO Martin Shkreli

The lone copy of Wu-Tang Clan's Once Upon a Time in Shaolin has been sold to pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli for a reported $2 million dollars. If Shkreli's name looks familiar to you it's because he was in the news earlier this year when his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, bought an AIDS-related treatment drug called Daraprim and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750. The news caused BBC to write that Shkreli "may be the most hated man in America."

According to Bloomberg, Shkreli thought that his insane price gouging of the drug and resulting bad press may have caused the Wu to out of the deal. "I was a little worried that they were going to walk out of the deal," he told Bloomberg. "But by then we'd closed. The whole kind of thing since then has been just kind of 'Well, do we want to announce it's him? Do we not want to announce it's him?' I think they were trying to cover their butts a little bit."

RZA, who likened Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to a piece of art and came up with the idea to sell it as such, told Bloomberg in a statement that "The sale of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was agreed upon in May, well before Martin Skhreli's [sic] business practices came to light. We decided to give a significant portion of the proceeds to charity."

Shkreli has not listened to the album yet and plans on doing so when he's bored. "I could be convinced to listen to it earlier if Taylor Swift wants to hear it or something like that," he said. "But for now, I think I'm going to kind of save it for a rainy day."

Martin is now making a list of artists he'd pay to release an album just for him and broadcasting his list live on YouTube. You can't make this up. Watch that here.