Since winning Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin with a $2 million bid in an auction two years ago, Martin Shkreli has done just about everything to remind us that he's the one in possession of the most expensive album ever sold.
After promising to release the album if Donald Trump won the presidential election last November, Shkreli played a few snippets during a live stream. In one of the clips on a YouTube account called "Best of Martin Shkreli," ten minutes of Shaolin is playingin the background of an interview. But, in a surprising twist, two people linked to the Wu-Tang Clan told Bloomberg through their respective managers that the 31-track double CD in Shkreli's possession may not really be a Wu-Tang album.
“It’s not an authorized Wu-Tang Clan album,” Domingo Neris, manager of rapper U-God, claimed. "It never was.” Method Man's manager James Ellis also questioned whether Shaolin was a true Wu-Tang album. "When we did the verses, it was for a Cilvaringz album," he said. "How it became a Wu-Tang album from there? We have no knowledge of that."
Killa Sin, a member of Wu-Tang's extended family, recalls recording sessions with producer Cilvaringz in New York, but he never got the impression that he was working on a Wu-Tang album. "The way he presented it was it was going to be basically his album, and he wanted me to do some work for him," Killa Sin said.
With so many people questioning the validity of the $2 million album, Shkreli must have heard it back to front in order to confirm that what he spent so much money on was the real deal, right? Well, when he put the album on eBay earlier this month, Shkreli wrote in the description, "I have not carefully listened to the album."