Who is Vivek Ramaswamy?
Smart, energetic, engaging and dangerously unprincipled is how Vivek Ramaswamy struck me as I watched him in the August 23rd debate among seven candidates seeking the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. His performance in that debate prompted me to learn more about him. What I discovered fortified my initial impression. He is impressive in almost every respect, but also incredibly ambitious and seemingly willing to say and do almost anything to achieve his goals. In that respect he reminds me of Donald Trump whom he both admires and emulates. Perhaps even more troubling are his ideas about what is in the best interest of our nation.
His Background
Wikipedia has an excellent summary of Ramaswamy’s brief career, the highlights of which are summarized in the succeeding paragraphs. Like Kamala Harris, Ramaswamy, now age 38, is the first child of two over-achieving immigrant parents. His father, a college graduate, worked as an engineer and patent attorney for General Electric, while his mother, a medical college graduate, worked as a geriatric psychiatrist. Ramaswamy was born in Ohio where he attended public schools through eighth grade. He then transferred to a parochial high school graduating as the valedictorian of his class. During these formative years, in addition to his academic accomplishments, he became a highly proficient tennis player, achieving a national junior ranking. He also became a skilled pianist as well as a talented rap singer.
In 2003, he attended Harvard College, graduating summa cum laude in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in biology. While at Harvard, he co-founded Campus Venture Network which (a la Mark Zuckerberg) maintains a website that provides software and networking resources to university entrepreneurs. That entity was sold to a not-for-profit foundation for an undisclosed amount and now operates on several college campuses. During his years at Harvard Ramaswamy also worked as a summer intern for two investment firms.
Upon leaving Harvard he took a job with a venture capital company and put his scientific training to work directing investments in pharmaceutical and biotech companies. He was quickly made a partner in this firm. In 2011, he was awarded a prestigious post-graduate fellowship which he used to attend Yale Law School, graduating in 2013. While attending Yale he also worked for a hedge fund. He never sought to practice law which leads me to believe that his principal interest during his years at Yale was managing his investment portfolio. That supposition is supported by the fact that by the time he had finished his legal studies his net worth had grown to around $15 million.
After leaving Yale, Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences, a company established to acquire the rights to pharmaceutical products and to develop and market those products. He was successful from the very outset, raising almost $100 million in start-up capital from a group of institutional investors. Admittedly, very impressive for a 28 year old. In December 2014, Axovant, a newly-formed wholly-owned subsidiary of Roivant, purchased the patent rights for intepirdine, an Alzheimer’s drug that had failed four previous clinical trials. Following that acquisition, Ramaswamy privately raised another $360 million for the development and marketing of intepirdine. In Trump-like fashion, Ramaswamy also talked his way onto the cover of Forbes Magazine, boasting that Roivant would "be the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry."
Before clinical trials for Intepirdine were even begun, he engineered an initial public offering of Axovant shares, raising an additional $315 million. Axovant immediately became a "Wall Street darling" and its market value soared to almost $3 billion. Ramaswamy quickly (and wisely) sold a portion of his shares in Roivant, reaping more than $37 million in capital gains. In September 2017, however, intepirdine failed in its large clinical trial and the market value of its shares plunged, dropping more than 75% of their value in a single day.
Undeterred and ever-optimistic, Ramaswamy turned his attention back to Roivant, the parent company, and struck a series of deals which ultimately netted him an additional $175 million in capital gains. Today, Ramaswamy remains the sixth-largest shareholder of Roivant, retaining a 7.17% stake. In 2020, while Ramaswamy was still its CEO, Roivant established a nonprofit entity which championed corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) initiatives within the biopharma and biotech industries.
Two years later, Ramaswamy set aside his social-minded inclinations when he co-founded and became the executive chairman of Strive Asset Management. Ramaswany branded Strive’s investment philosophy as "anti-woke" and "anti-ESG." Using his considerable persuasive skills, he raised about $20 million from private investors including Peter Thiel, J. D. Vance and Bill Ackman. Strive's flagship investment fund, DRLL, was launched in 2022 as an energy sector index fund. Ramaswamy said that Strive would push the energy companies in which DRLL invested to drill for more oil, frack for more natural gas, and "do whatever allows them to be most successful over the long run without regard to political, social, cultural or environmental agendas." As of June 2023, Strive's total assets under management had grown to approximately $750 million.
In February 2023 Ramaswamy left Strive to focus on his presidential ambitions, declaring his candidacy for the 2024 Republican nomination on Tucker Carlson Tonight. He had shown an earlier interest in politics during his years at Harvard when he joined the Harvard Political Union and later became its president. At that time he supported the Libertarian Party. The failure of the Libertarian Party’s candidates to win even a single state in the 2004 presidential election apparently turned him away from politics as he did not vote in the presidential elections in 2008, 2012 or 2016. His interest in politics, however, was resurrected in 2020 when another 30-something, Pete Buttigieg, had done surprisingly well in the Democratic presidential race.
It was not Buttigieg, but Trump, that Ramaswamy chose to emulate when he embarked on his career in politics. It was not simply because he would be running as a Republican and advocating traditional Republican policies. Rather, like Trump, he was a successful entrepreneur with no governmental experience and would be competing against others (including Trump) with years of governmental service. Unlike Trump, however, he had to quickly gain public notoriety. Yet, even in this regard, Trump was a good role model as Trump had shown how to totally captivate the attention of the media as no prior politician had ever done.
To distinguish himself from Trump, in announcing his candidacy, Ramaswamy publicly released 20 years of his individual income tax returns and called upon his rivals in the primary to do the same. In August 2023, Forbes estimated Ramaswamy's net worth at more than $950 million. In the roughly six months since he announced his campaign he has gone from a relatively unknown individual to polling fourth among the eleven announced candidates seeking the Republican 2024 presidential nomination. He accomplished this amazing feat by adopting many of the techniques that Donald Trump had employed in his initial presidential campaign. He turned one of the rooms on his estate into a podcast studio where he spent the first weeks of his campaign producing daily episodes of “The Vivek Show.” While these podcasts helped him to hone his political messages, they didn’t do much to build him a following.
He soon adopted Trump’s technique of making outrageous comments to draw attention to himself and to bait media organizations, including Fox News, to invite him to appear on their talk shows. These provocations, also attracted the interest and support of tech-friendly CEOs with a libertarian bent. This low cost strategy worked although Ramaswamy admitted that appearing on any and every media platform that would have him was exhausting. Still, it was a price that someone like him who had never run for office had to pay to achieve enough public attention to become a viable candidate. When he appeared on those shows he would attack liberals and seek to appeal to MAGA Republicans. These efforts enabled him to qualify to appear in the Republican Party’s first televised debate.
His performance in the August 23rd debate clearly accelerated interest in him. To be sure, he was attacked by most of the other candidates for some of his stated positions. He not only held his ground but, as Trump had done in his debate with Biden, Ramaswamy continued to speak while his attackers were trying to rebut what he had said. Even though this tactic offended some members of the live and TV audience, it established him as combatant and a real contender for the nomination. More importantly, it greatly expanded the public’s interest in him. Among the more vocal critics of his debate performance was Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s political advisor. Rove concluded that “He is a performance artist who says outrageous things, smears his opponents and appeals to the dark parts of the American psyche.” Rove continued. “There’s already a GOP candidate who does all those things, and worse. Republicans deserve a choice, not an echo.”
His Positions
Ramaswamy’s website does not include a list of his on-air statement. This is a tacit admission that they were simply designed to garner attention and were not intended as serious proposals. By not reducing them to writing Ramaswamy left himself room to deny that he ever advocated them or to simply assert that he was being quoted out of context. Among the statements attributed to him by various media outlets are the following:
Climate change is a hoax and U.S. should expand its economy by expanding its use of fossil fuels;
The U.S. should not be funding the War in Ukraine and should improve its relations with Russia so as to prevent Russia and China from becoming close allies;
Abortion should be exclusively regulated by the states;
The voting age should be raised to 25 with earlier ballot access for those who have passed civics tests or performed specified government service;
Affirmative action should be abolished;
The U.S. Military should be employed to stop the invasion across our southern border and to interdict the flow of drugs coming from Mexico;
The Department of Education should be eliminated and its funding given to families to choose their children’s schools;
The FBI should be closed and 75% of the federal government’s employees should be terminated; and
U.S. regulations should be cut and administrative agencies should be pared back.
For a more complete (but likely inaccurate) recount of his various on-air statement, see an April 2023 article published by Breitbart. Many of his reported statements lead to the conclusion that Ramaswamy was either woefully ignorant about the subjects he addressed or was simply shamelessly pandering to his low perception of the intelligence of MAGA voters.
His Political Philosophy
Ramaswamy describes himself as a libertarian and a nationalist who believes that America needs to rebuild its sense of civic pride. He clearly supports free-market capitalism and opposes both governmental regulation (as well as notions of social responsibility) to restrict business activity. As an advocate of “small government” he is unlikely to be favorably disposed to supporting the nation’s social safety net, including programs like Medicare, Social Security and Obamacare. Specifically, he opposes affirmative action, labeling it as a form of racism. Like Trump, he also has authoritarian tendencies and would like to be able to act in many areas without having to seek the permission of the U.S. Congress.
His Game Plan
Ramaswamy’s stated goal is that he is running for president although it is not clear how he plans to achieve that goal by heaping praise on Donald Trump and echoing many of Trump’s positions. This has led some to speculate that he is really seeking to become Trump’s running mate. Although Trump has said that he is open to having Ramaswamy as a potential running mate, Trump has a history of saying nice things about those who say nice things about him, only to later attack them. In reality, however, Ramaswamy is too smart to allow himself to become ensnared in Trump’s illegal schemes and is too ambitious for Trump to give Ramaswamy a position over which he has no power to silence him.
Since they both regard themselves as consummate deal-makers, it’s possible that they could strike a deal for Ramaswamy to run as Trump’s vice president with the understanding that Trump would resign shortly after the election and Ramaswamy would issue him a pardon. This would enable Trump to go out a “winner” and avoid accountability for his federal crimes. The problem is that such a deal would not eliminate the two criminal cases against Trump based on state law nor the civil legal actions being asserted against him by E. Jean Carroll, the New York Attorney General and a myriad of other individuals who were injured in physical and verbal attacks instigated by Trump.
Ramaswamy does seem to respect Trump’s skills at manipulating people and the media and has said that, if he were elected, he would pardon Trump, if necessary, and welcome him as an advisor in his administration. This seems to imply that Ramaswamy’s game plan is similar to that of Ron DeSantis; namely, to put himself in a position to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee should the Party conclude that Trump is simply too toxic to win a general election. This is not an unrealistic plan as Trump is likely to be convicted of one or more felony counts before the Republican Convention next July and DeSantis is proving to be a wholly unlikeable candidate even among MAGA voters. Todd L. Belt, the director of the Political Management program at The George Washington Graduate School of Political Management has suggested that “the idea of an outsider being able to correct what’s wrong in Washington is very appealing, particularly – especially for Republicans – if that outsider is a successful businessperson.” The question remains, however, whether MAGA voters (many of whom are white supremacists) are ready to embrace a brown-skin elitist presidential nominee even if he’s smart, a libertarian and against abortions.