Fentanyl Billionaire No More: John Kapoor's Net Worth Drops Below $1 Billion

The founder of embattled fentanyl manufacturer Insys Therapeutics is no longer a billionaire. Five years after joining the Forbes Billionaires list, John Kapoor now has a net worth of $875 million.

Kapoor's fortune is mostly comprised of his stakes in Insys Therapeutics and generic drug manufacturer Akorn Inc., whose shares fell 24% on Friday after a Delaware judge allowed German drugmaker Fresenius to officially terminate its merger agreement with the Lake Forest, Ill.-based company. Back in 2017, Fresenius had announced plans to acquire Akorn in a deal valued at $4.3 billion plus debt, but backed out earlier this year, citing "material breaches of FDA data integrity," according a press release from the company, related to its drug development. (Akorn has denied that those accusations had any merit.)

Kapoor became chairman of Akorn in 1990 and came on as CEO of the company twice, first in 1996 and again in 2001, as the company faced various accounting and FDA issues. (Kapoor was the subject of a 2016 Forbes profile, which investigated his history of founding companies and allowing them to push legal and ethical limits.) He resigned in October 2017, days after he was arrested in Phoenix on charges related to his alleged participation in a scheme at Insys to bribe doctors to prescribe Subsys, a powerful and deadly opioid spray. Kapoor pleaded not guilty soon after his arrest and now awaits a trial scheduled to begin in January. Just last week the former Insys sales executive Alec Burlakoff pleaded guilty to a count of racketeering conspiracy.

Forbes first reported that Kapoor became a billionaire in 2013. Back then business was flying high. Shares of his Insys were trading at $15 per share and shares of Akorn were trading at $20 per share. Kapoor's net worth peaked on the 2015 Forbes 400 list when he had an estimated net worth of $3.3 billion. At the close of trading on Friday, shares of Insys were down to $5.18 and Akorn were down to $4.26. Just about year ago, Kapoor's stake in Akorn was worth $950 million.

In November, Insys announced plans to try to sell its fentanyl business. No buyer has emerged so far, and it may be tough to unload given the nearly 60% drop in annual sales of fentanyl spray Subsys since its peak in 2015. The company reported $17 million from Subsys sales in its third quarter.

Can Insys hang on? It sells one other drug, Syndros, a liquid dronabinol formulation that can be prescribed to treat patients suffering from weight loss from anorexia or AIDS or to treat nausea in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. It had sales of $976,000 during the company's most recent quarter. Kapoor's attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

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