Pharma profiteer Martin Shkreli blew $120 on a cup of tea to impress an actress he met on Tinder, his date revealed Tuesday.
Jacklyn Collier, 30, said she went out with Shkreli after he infamously jacked up the price of AIDS drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750, but before he was busted on securities fraud charges.
When he “super-liked” her on the dating app, she met him at Brushstroke in Tribeca, where Shkreli turned out to be “a lot smaller than I thought . . . and seemed really nervous,” Collier wrote in the Washington Post.
After sharing a laugh about the menu’s Gold Medal Sencha tea for $120 a cup, Collier writes, “I thought about making a price-gouging joke, but couldn’t think fast enough.”
Shkreli told her “people saying mean stuff didn’t bother him,” and that increasing the cost of Daraprim wouldn’t keep it from needy patients.
Later, Shkreli ordered the budget-busting tea and offered Collier a cup, but, “I couldn’t bring myself to say yes . . . When Martin finished his tea, I asked how he liked it. ‘I’m not really a big tea drinker,’ he replied. I thought of all the good I could do with that money — donating it to charity, buying a new winter coat, buying myself 20 venti iced soy vanilla chai lattes. He might as well have eaten a $100 bill in front of me.”
In case you need a refresh, here’s how Martin Shkreli became America’s most hated CEO: