Episode 1036: Martin Shkreli Discusses Leaving Q⧸C Technologies Over Financial Engineering

Martin Shkreli (0:00)

Yeah, so the QCLS thing, we left because the, if you look at the equity, there's preferred stock, and then there's warrants, and the warrants make it so that basically the common stock is worthless, or, you know, can't be valued. And like management just didn't treat the common stock with any respect, so. And we were paid with common stock, so there's no real way for us to get any confidence that the common stock was going to be useful. And it was just kind of a, I wouldn't call it a shit show, but it was just a little bit kind of crappy in general. There wasn't much infrastructure. There wasn't much support, so. It was pretty peaceful. I mean, I just said, listen, you guys have to kill these warrants because nobody's going to invest in this company, nobody's going to want to work at this company, and they didn't want to kill the warrants. So it's this like weird structured finance thing. Like I, I don't know if it was a scam from day one. I'm not sure what that means. I'm not sure. Leonard, I lost money on QCLS. Me and my wife bought a bunch of it. And now we're looking at a big loss, so. Yeah, we built, we built an actual business. I mean, it was the start of a business. But listen, you've never built anything in your life, so kiss my ass. You know, at the end of the day. What's that? I mean, listen, I'm ready to go at any time. I build real businesses. The fuck are you? The re-ratcheting warrants. I've been in finance 25 years, and I didn't even see the ratchet on the warrants. I'm sure we still have shares, but I don't... I know we have shares. We have all kinds of shares. We got shares they gave us. We got shares we bought. It's all fucking worthless.

Yeah, I mean, I tried to explain to them that they need to get rid of these warrants, but they don't want to listen. The CEO has to work for the common stockholder. I don't know. Yeah, I might start, we might start a new thing, LLP. There's a bunch of investors have already asked us and approached us, so we'll see. We'll see. You know, it wasn't easy doing two companies at once, so I will say that. Shit, it's not easy at all. So I think, I don't think I'd want to be the CEO, to be frank. You know, I could start the company off, I can help run it to start, but eventually I'm not probably the best guy to be the long-term CEO. Just too much, I have too much work as is.

Yeah, the problem is, if they do, you know, companies like this are gonna need a lot of financing, and I think they actually short the stock, because they own the warrants. So if they short the stock, and then there's a financing, they can I... can buy in the financing, and the cover there short, and the warrants go back down. It's insane. I mean, it's like, it's totally legal, so I don't want to use the wrong word, but it's, I don't want to be a part of that. So fucking nuts. And I really should have known better. I asked a close friend of mine, yeah, Liquid is a partnership we're doing. We'll have more to say about that soon. Yeah, good for them. It's not good for us. I mean, I lost money. A lot of my friends lost money. It's fucking, pissed me off. But again, I was just like, at some point, I was like, you guys have to change these warrants. And they're like, nope, we're not going to do it. I was like, all right, we quit. They want to give me more common stock. And I was like, dude, that's the problem. You keep giving me common stock because this common stock is like toilet paper. It's not worth anything. Don't you understand? The more you give me, the more it's going to go down. This is toilet paper to them. There's funds that do this structured finance. That's the whole pipe kind of and structure these things to death.

It's like, you guys want to build a company or do you want to play around with some fucking nonsense? And the answer is play around with some nonsense. I want to build a company. Well, you see, with the Triple Ratchet Warrants and the Preferred Stock on top, I'm like, bro, what the fuck is all this? This isn't a company. This is a fucking financial engineer's, you know, wet dream. I don't want to just try to build a real asset, real company, something you can be proud of. I want my Triple Ratchet Warrants.