“Pharma bro” and disgraced Wu-Tang fan, Martin Shkreli was slapped with a federal preliminary injunction on August 24, 2024 to halt taunting the real owners of Wu-Tang’s singular album, “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” and distributing bootleg copies of the album he once owned.

Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nothing to F**k With

Once Upon a Time is a one-of-a-kind album protesting the devaluation of digital music in the Internet age. It shipped as a single hard copy of 2 CDs in a nickel case. It also came with a 174-page, leather-bound book and a set of speakers.

I don’t know. I thought it was some circus spectacle. I never really spoke to RZA about it; it’s an uncomfortable subject to most of the guys, so we don’t really discuss it too much. The process of the thing being made was never told to us. We were never told what it was. It was never supposed to be a Wu-Tang album. We were recording and being paid to do a certain amount of records by a guy whose name I don’t want to mention. He took all these verses—some of them were old verses—and put them altogether into a compilation of Wu-Tang songs and marketed it as a Wu-Tang album, and a single copy of a Wu-Tang album. We all had a problem with it because that’s not how it was described to us.

Method Man

Martin Shkreli purchased Once Upon a Time for $2 million in 2015. However, Shkreli would draw the public’s ire after it was known he was overcharging for life saving drugs. He also faced 7 years in prison and a $7.4 million fine for securities fraud. That case forced Shkreli to sell Once Upon a Time.

Who Bought It?

A digitally autonomous organization, DAO, called PleasrDAO purchased the album. DAOs are groups of anonymous people who band together over crypto currencies. The DAO uses a put up or shut up voting system to make decisions. The majority of the crypto holders in the DAO make the decision automatically through so-called smart contracts.

Anyway. The government seized Once Upon a Time as part of Shkreli’s sentence and sold the album to PleasrDAO’s members for $4.75 million.

Then Pharma Bro struck again. In 2024, Shkreli began playing trackings from Once Upon a Time on podcasts, his Discord server, and everywhere he could. He taunted the DAO’s members calling them idiots for thinking he wouldn’t have made a copy of a $2 million album and bragged how he gave copies of the album to “50 chicks.” Having owned the album apparently helped his sex life.

Of course I made MP3 copies, they’re like hidden in safes all around the world… I’m not stupid. I don’t buy something for two million dollars just so I can keep one copy.

Martin Shkreli

PleasrDAO is made up of 74 members. There’s an estimated 5000 copies floating out there on the Internet. The preliminary injunction forces Shkreli to cease and desist spreading the album. PleasrDAO has asked the judge to force Shkreli into telling where all of the copies have gone.