'Pharma Bro' Martin Shkreli claims that he's made more than a dozen accounts on X, but Elon Musk keeps taking them down

• Martin Shkreli claims that under Elon Musk's leadership more than a dozen of his X accounts have been taken down.
• In total, he's tried to create up to 20 new accounts since his original was suspended in 2017, he told Fox Business.
• "Elon preaches free speech, but his actions are showing the opposite," Shkreli said.

So-called "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli claims that he's made himself more than a dozen accounts on the social-media platform X since Elon Musk took over, but that the site has subsequently taken them all down.

Shkreli told Fox Business that he'd been trying to get mutual friends to persuade Musk to give him access to his original account, which was suspended in 2017. Twitter rebranded to X in late July.

Shkreli became know as the "Pharma Bro" in 2015 after he hiked up the price of his company's life-saving drug Daraprim — the only FDA-approved treatment for toxoplasmosis — from $13.50 to $750 per pill, leading to the Federal Trade Commission and New York Attorney General Letitia James suing Shkreli and others in an antitrust case. He has been banned from the pharmaceutical industry for life.

In an unrelated matter, Shkreli served four-and-a-half years of a seven-year prison sentence for defrauding investors of $10 million when he managed a hedge fund. He was released in May 2022.

Shkreli told Fox Business in a new interview that since his release he'd been been trying to regain access to his old X account, saying that he needed it to contact tech CEOs and investors while working on a new venture, an AI healthcare assistant.

He said that he's been forced to create up to 20 new accounts but that they keep getting shut down by the social-media site. This has happened "over a dozen times" since Musk bought the platform in October, Shkreli claimed.

"Elon preaches free speech, but his actions are showing the opposite," Shkreli told Fox Business. "Musk has been a savior for people like Kanye and Laura Loomer, but I guess free speech isn't so free for me."

He claimed that someone "close to Musk" told him that the tech billionaire "doesn't like other alpha males in the room," which Shkreli said he believes is a key reason why Musk has failed to reinstate his account.

X did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on whether it had taken down Shkreli's accounts and, if so, why.

Shkreli's account was suspended in 2017, which the company attributed to his harassment of journalist Lauren Duca on the site. Shkreli told Fox Business that it was a "teasing war" and a "silly mistake."

After being released from prison, Shkreli posted on Facebook that "getting out of real prison is easier than getting out of Twitter prison,"

Shkreli currently has an X account with around 41,700 followers. He posted on X last week that if anyone could get the ban on his original account overturned he would give them $10,000, to which Musk's ex-girlfriend Grimes said that she would "fight" for his handle is Shkreli agreed to "more ethical behaviors."

Shkreli has since hiked up his offer to $15,000.