On Nov. 24, 2015, Wu-Tang Clan tried to rewrite the rules of music (yes, again). Instead of dropping their long-gestating 31-track double album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin like everyone else, they pressed a single physical copy and decided to auction it off like a rare piece of fine art. Fans pictured Quentin Tarantino bidding, or a museum treating it as a landmark in hip-hop history. Instead, the winner was Martin Shkreli — the pharmaceutical executive who became public enemy No. 1 after raising the price of an essential AIDS drug from $13.50 to $750 per pill.

The moment the buyer was revealed, Wu-Tang’s art experiment stopped being a heady statement about music ownership and instantly became a cultural lightning strike. What should’ve been a radical celebration of hip-hop turned into one of the most chaotic celebrity-related scandals of the decade.

How Wu-Tang Tried To Turn an Album Into Fine Art

The project took six years to complete, crafted on “Wu-time” and protected with museum-level secrecy. Only wealthy bidders were granted private listening sessions, and even the auction’s terms were largely kept under wraps. The vision was simple: elevate a hip-hop album to the level of a Monet or a Warhol, where exclusivity is part of the experience.

Shkreli paid a reported $2 million to claim the lone copy, but negotiations dragged on for months because the contract was nearly as unique as the album itself. Wu-Tang hoped the buyer would curate the work, host private exhibitions, and treat the project as a living piece of art. Instead, Shkreli treated it like a trophy to show off to the internet.

Fraud, Feds & Where The Album Ended Up

If the sale wasn’t controversial enough, everything that came next made it downright surreal. On Dec. 9, Shkreli tweeted, “Which artist should I now approach to buy my next private album from?” Two days later, Wu-Tang fans were already furious—and then the Ghostface Killah feud hit.

Ghostface didn’t mince words about Shkreli, and Shkreli fired back by threatening to remove Ghostface’s vocals from the album entirely. By the time federal authorities arrested Shkreli on securities-fraud charges in December 2015, the album had gone from a fine-art experiment to a cursed cultural artifact. Even Congress couldn’t get straight answers about it. When asked about the album during a 2016 hearing, Shkreli smirked and invoked the Fifth.

In 2018, Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison for defrauding investors. The album—considered an asset—was eventually seized by the government and later sold off to a private organization dedicated to preserving it. Its future remains shrouded in almost the same mystery Wu-Tang intended from the beginning, just not for the reasons anyone expected.

Even today, no album has matched the mystery-meets-madness surrounding Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. And 10 years later, its story is still as unbelievable as the day it sold.

Timeline: The Once Upon A Time In Shaolin Saga