He’s facing fraud charges and has repeatedly affirmed his status as poster boy for Wall Street greed with his price-gouging practices while head of Turing Pharmaceuticals. So what’s “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli up to now? Apparently, he’s trying to buy Kanye West’s new album, “The Life of Pablo,” with the caveat that no one else can own it.

Shkreli on Thursday made his $10 million offer to West public with a series of tweets, including one with an image of a letter addressed to the rapper (via @MartinShkreli):

There’s a certain logic to Shkreli’s gesture. The former hedge fund vigilante famously bought Wu-Tang Clan’s album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” for $2 million, thus taking it off the market, as he is aiming to do with West’s latest release — but the originating idea for the Wu-Tang sale came from the musicians, not their acquisitive patron. (Side note: Now that album is also posing a bit of a legal headache for Shkreli.) West, who was on hand to debut his Yeezy Season 3 fashion designs and “The Life of Pablo” later Thursday at New York’s Madison Square Garden, seemingly intends to offer mass access to his music.

Shrkeli’s Twitter feed contained other news-cycle hijack attempts and sly nods to his controversial stature, such as this one:

Whether Shkreli’s $10 million bid to corner the Kanye West market was as successful as Turing’s was for the old drug Daraprim — for which Shkreli jacked up the price by 5,000 percent — seems unlikely. Meanwhile, we noticed that one of our visual comments about Shkreli (and a certain other art-of-the-deal-er), posted on Feb. 4 after he appeared before Congress to discuss his company’s drug-pricing practices, made its way to his corner of the Twittersphere as well. Our original is posted after the version from Shkreli’s feed below:

–Posted by Kasia Anderson

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