Vivek Ramaswamy facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Vivek Ramaswamy
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Ramaswamy in 2024
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| Born |
Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy
August 9, 1985 Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.
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| Education | Harvard University (BA) Yale University (JD) |
| Occupation |
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| Political party | Republican |
| Spouse(s) |
Apoorva Tewari
(m. 2015) |
| Children | 2 |
Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy (born August 9, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and politician. He founded Roivant Sciences, a pharmaceutical company, in 2014. In February 2023, Ramaswamy declared his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination in the 2024 United States presidential election. He suspended his campaign in January 2024, after finishing fourth in the Iowa caucuses and proceeded to endorse Trump's candidacy.
Ramaswamy was born in Cincinnati to Indian immigrant parents. He graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in biology and later earned a degree from Yale Law School. Ramaswamy worked as an investment partner at a hedge fund before founding Roivant Sciences. He also co-founded an investment firm, Strive Asset Management.
Ramaswamy has stated that he sees the United States in the middle of a national identity crisis precipitated by what he calls "new secular religions like COVID-ism, climate-ism, and gender ideology". He is also a critic of environmental, social, and corporate governance initiatives. In January 2024, Forbes estimated Ramaswamy's net worth at more than $960 million; his wealth comes from biotech and financial businesses.
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Early life and education
Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy was born on August 9, 1985, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Indian Hindu immigrant parents. His parents are Tamil Brahmins from Kerala. His father, V. Ganapathy Ramaswamy, a graduate of the National Institute of Technology Calicut, worked as an engineer for General Electric, while his mother, Geetha Ramaswamy, a graduate of the Mysore Medical College & Research Institute, worked as a geriatric psychiatrist for Merck and Schering-Plough. His parents immigrated from Palakkad district in Kerala, where the family had an ancestral home in a traditional agraharam in the town of Vadakkencherry.
Ramaswamy was raised in Ohio. Growing up, Ramaswamy often attended the local Hindu temple in Dayton with his family. His conservative Christian piano teacher, who gave him private lessons from elementary through high school, also influenced his social views. He spent many summer vacations traveling to India with his parents. In high school, Ramaswamy was a nationally ranked tennis player.
Education
Ramaswamy attended public schools through eighth grade. He then attended Cincinnati's St. Xavier High School, a Catholic school affiliated with the Jesuit order, graduating as valedictorian in 2003.
In 2007, Ramaswamy graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in biology, and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. At Harvard, he gained a reputation as a brash and confident libertarian. He was a member of the Harvard Political Union, becoming its president. He told The Harvard Crimson that he considered himself a contrarian who loved to debate. While in college, he performed Eminem covers and libertarian-themed rap music under the stage name and alter ego "Da Vek", and was an intern for the hedge fund Amaranth Advisors and investment bank Goldman Sachs. He wrote his senior thesis on the ethical questions raised by creating human-animal chimeras, earning him a Bowdoin Prize.
In 2011, Ramaswamy was awarded a post-graduate fellowship by The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. Ramaswamy later said that by the time he attended Yale, he was already wealthy from his activities in the finance, pharmaceutical, and biotech industries; he said in 2023 that he had a net worth of around $15 million before graduating from law school. At Yale, he befriended fellow Ohio native and future U.S. vice president JD Vance. He earned a Juris Doctor in 2013. In a 2023 interview, Ramaswamy said that he was a member of the campus Jewish intellectual discussion society Shabtai while a law student.
Business career
Early career
In 2007, Ramaswamy and Travis May co-founded Campus Venture Network, which published a private social networking website for university students who aspired to launch a business. The company was sold to the nonprofit Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in 2009.
Ramaswamy worked at the hedge fund QVT Financial from 2007 to 2014. He was a partner and co-managed the firm's biotech portfolio. QVT's biotech investments under Ramaswamy included stakes in Palatin Technologies, Concert Pharmaceuticals, Pharmasset, and Martin Shkreli's Retrophin. In a 2023 speech and in his book Woke Inc., Ramaswamy called Shkreli, whose company had greatly increased the cost of a life-saving drug, both "brilliant" and a pathological liar. He criticized the U.S. Department of Justice for prosecuting Shkreli, calling his fraud a victimless crime.
Roivant Sciences and subsidiaries
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In 2014, Ramaswamy founded the biotechnology firm Roivant Sciences; the "Roi" in the company's name refers to return on investment. The company was incorporated in Bermuda, a tax haven, and received almost $100 million in start-up capital from QVT and other investors, including RA Capital Management, Visium Asset Management, and the hedge fund managers D. E. Shaw & Co. and Falcon Edge Capital. Roivant's strategy was to purchase patents from larger pharmaceutical companies for drugs that had not yet been successfully developed, and then bring them to the market. The company created numerous subsidiaries, including Dermavant (focused on dermatology), Urovant (focused on urological disease), and China-based Sinovant and Cytovant, both focused on the Asian market.
In 2015, Ramaswamy raised $360 million for the Roivant subsidiary Axovant Sciences in an attempt to market intepirdine as a drug for Alzheimer's disease. In December 2014, Axovant purchased the patent for intepirdine from GlaxoSmithKline (where the drug had failed four previous clinical trials) for $5 million, a small sum in the industry. Ramaswamy appeared on the cover of Forbes in 2015, and said his company would "be the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry." Before new clinical trials began, he engineered Axovant's initial public offering (IPO); it became a "Wall Street darling" and raised $315 million. The company's market value initially soared to almost $3 billion, although at the time it only had eight employees, including Ramaswamy's brother and mother. Ramaswamy took a massive payout after selling a portion of his shares in Roivant to Viking Global Investors. He claimed more than $37 million in capital gains in 2015. Ramaswamy said his company would be the "Berkshire Hathaway of drug development" and touted the drug as a "tremendous" opportunity that "could help millions" of patients, prompting some criticism that he was overpromising.
In September 2017, the company announced that intepirdine had failed in its large clinical trial. The company's value plunged; it lost 75% in one day and continued to decline afterward. Shareholders who lost money included various institutional investors, such as the California State Teachers' Retirement System pension fund. Ramaswamy was insulated from much of Axovant's losses because he held his stake through Roivant. The company abandoned intepirdine. In 2018, Ramaswamy said he had no regrets about how the company handled the drug; in subsequent years, he said he regretted the outcome but was annoyed by criticism of the company. Axovant thereafter attempted to reinvent itself as a gene therapy company, and dissolved in 2023.
In 2017, Roivant partnered with CITIC Private Equity of the Chinese state-owned CITIC Group to form Sinovant. In 2017, Ramaswamy struck a deal with Masayoshi Son in which SoftBank invested $1.1 billion in Roivant. In 2019, Roivant sold its stake in five subsidiaries (or "vants"), including Enzyvant, to Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma; Ramaswamy made $175 million in capital gains from the sale. The deal also gave Sumitomo Dainippon a 10% stake in Roivant.
While campaigning for the presidency, Ramaswamy called himself a "scientist" and said, "I developed a number of medicines."
In January 2021, Ramaswamy stepped down as CEO of Roivant Sciences and assumed the role of executive chairman. In 2021, after he resigned as CEO, Roivant was listed on the Nasdaq via a reverse merger with Montes Archimedes Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition vehicle. In February 2023, Ramaswamy stepped down as chair of Roivant to focus on his presidential campaign.
Ramaswamy remains the sixth-largest shareholder of Roivant, retaining a 7.17% stake. During Ramaswamy's time running Roivant the company had never been profitable.
Roivant Social Ventures
In 2020, when Ramaswamy was CEO of Roivant Sciences, the company established a nonprofit social-impact arm, Roivant Social Ventures (RSV), with his support. An earlier iteration of RSV, the Roivant Foundation, was created in 2018. Although Ramaswamy's presidential campaign centers on opposing corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) initiatives, RSV worked in support of pro-DEI and ESG initiatives, including promoting health equity and diversity within the biopharma and biotech industries. While campaigning, Ramaswamy has downplayed his role in creating and overseeing RSV.
Strive Asset Management
In early 2022, together with his high school friend Anson Frericks, Ramaswamy co-founded Strive Asset Management, a Columbus, Ohio-based asset management firm. The firm raised about $20 million from outside investors, including Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and Bill Ackman.
Strive has branded itself as "anti-woke" and its funds as "anti-ESG"; Ramaswamy has claimed that the largest asset managers, such as BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, mix business with ESG politics to the detriment of their funds' investors.
Pension fund managers take account of ESG in the assessment of long-term risk, including climate risks, when making portfolio decisions. Ramaswamy has crusaded against ESG and emphasizes the doctrine of shareholder primacy, famously articulated by Milton Friedman. In his book Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam and elsewhere, he has depicted private corporations' socially conscious investing as simultaneously ineffective and the greatest threat to American society. He published a second book, Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence, in September 2022, a few months before announcing his presidential candidacy.
Strive's flagship fund, the exchange-traded fund DRLL, launched in 2022 as an "anti-woke" energy sector index fund. Ramaswamy said that Strive would push energy companies 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."
In October 2022, Ramaswamy held closed-door meetings with South Carolina lawmakers in a session arranged by state treasurer Curtis Loftis; during the meetings, Ramaswamy pitched Strive to manage South Carolina pension funds. In June 2023, after The Post and Courier reported on the meetings, the sessions were criticized as a form of unregistered lobbying; Ramaswamy's campaign manager denied any impropriety.
Ramaswamy was Strive's executive chairman before resigning in February 2023 to focus on his presidential campaign.
Other ventures
In 2020, Ramaswamy co-founded Chapter Medicare, a Medicare navigation platform. He served on the Ohio COVID-19 Response Team.
He was chairman of OnCore Biopharma, a position he maintained at Tekmira Pharmaceuticals when the two companies merged in March 2015. He also was chair of the board of Arbutus Biopharma, a Canadian firm.
In May 2024, Ramaswamy acquired a 7.7% stake in BuzzFeed, later increased to 8.4%, making him the second-largest Class A shareholder in the company. Soon after the acquisition, he sent a letter to the company's board of directors, in which he suggested they hire conservative pundits such as Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Bill Maher, as well as three "high-profile directors, with strong track business records in new media" whom he knew. Analysts have predicted that his direction could seriously shift BuzzFeed's content and editorial approach.
Political career
Early political involvement
Ramaswamy said that he voted for Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 2004, but did not vote in the presidential elections in 2008, 2012, or 2016. He described himself as apolitical during this period. He supported Donald Trump in the 2020 election. In November 2021, Ramaswamy registered to vote in Franklin County, Ohio, as "unaffiliated", but described himself as a Republican.
Ramaswamy has made political contributions to both Democrats and Republicans. In 2016, he donated $2,700 to the campaign of Dena Grayson, a Florida Democrat running for Congress. From 2020 to 2023, he donated $30,000 to the Ohio Republican Party. Ramaswamy considered running in the 2022 U.S. Senate election in Ohio. He is a potential candidate in the 2026 Ohio gubernatorial election.
Department of Government Efficiency
Following his presidential campaign, on November 12, 2024, President-elect Donald Trump announced that Ramaswamy and businessman Elon Musk had been tasked to lead the newly-proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). He departed DOGE on January 20, 2025, to focus on a potential 2026 Ohio gubernatorial campaign. Multiple media reports suggest that friction between Ramaswamy and other DOGE leadership and staff caused the departure.
2024 presidential campaign
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On February 21, 2023, Ramaswamy declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 2024 on Tucker Carlson Tonight. He publicly released 20 years of his individual income tax returns and called upon his rivals in the primary to do the same. His fortune had made up the vast majority of his campaign's fundraising. From February to July 2023, Ramaswamy loaned his campaign more than $15 million; his campaign ended the second quarter of 2023 with about $9 million in cash on hand. His fundraising lagged far behind Donald Trump's and Ron DeSantis's, but exceeded most of the other Republican primary candidates'.
During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Ramaswamy sought to appeal to evangelical Christian right and Christian nationalist voters, an important part of the Republican base, some of whom are reluctant or unwilling to support a non-Christian presidential candidate such as Ramaswamy, who is Hindu. In campaign stops and interviews, Ramaswamy had criticized secularism, saying that the U.S. was founded on Christian values or Judeo-Christian values; that he shares those values; and that he believes in one God.
While campaigning, Ramaswamy called himself an "unapologetic American nationalist"; he often attacked DeSantis but avoided directly criticizing Trump.
In May 2023, Ramaswamy's campaign admitted that he had paid an editor to alter his Wikipedia biography before announcing his candidacy, but denied that the payment for edits was politically motivated. The edits to the Wikipedia biography removed references to Ramaswamy's postgraduate fellowship from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, as well as his involvement with the Ohio COVID-19 Response Team. Paul and Daisy Soros are the elder brother and sister-in-law, respectively, of businessman and social activist George Soros, who has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories among American conservatives and rightists. Ramaswamy's campaign denied attempting to "scrub" his Wikipedia page and argued the edits were revisions of "factual distortions".
In January, after finishing fourth in the Iowa caucuses, Ramaswamy ended his campaign and endorsed Trump.
Suspension
For the remainder of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Ramaswamy served the Trump campaign as a political surrogate, representing the Trump campaign and attending campaign events in place of the candidate.
Political positions
Ramaswamy pledged, if elected president, to rule by executive fiat to a degree unprecedented among modern U.S. presidents. He pledged to fire 75% of federal employees; dismantle civil service protections, making federal employment at-will; and abolish at least five federal agencies, including the Education Department, FBI, ATF, IRS, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and USDA's Food and Nutrition Service.
He called for an eight-year term for all government employees and pledged to revoke Executive Order 10988, an order issued by President John F. Kennedy that gives federal employees the right to collectively bargain. He proposed to repeal the federal law that requires presidents to spend all the money Congress appropriates.
Ramaswamy favored raising the standard voting age to 25, which would require repealing the 26th Amendment to the Constitution.
Ramaswamy also said he would have liked to end birthright citizenship.
He said he would have allow citizens between 18 and 24 to vote only if they are enlisted in the military, work as first responders, or pass the civics test required for naturalization. He supported making Election Day a federal holiday, while eliminating Juneteenth (which he called "useless" and "redundant") as a federal holiday.
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He expressed support for an inheritance tax, and called for ending the Federal Reserve's dual mandate.
Climate and energy
Although Ramaswamy said he was not a climate denier, he said in a Republican primary debate that "the climate change agenda is a hoax". He criticized what he calls the "climate cult" and said that as president, he would "abandon the anticarbon framework as it exists" and halt "any mandate to measure carbon dioxide".
Ramaswamy opposed subsidies for electric vehicles.
Personal life
Ramaswamy's wife, Apoorva Tewari Ramaswamy, is a laryngologist and surgeon; they met at Yale, when he was studying law and she was studying medicine. They married in 2015 and have two sons. Ramaswamy has a younger brother, Shankar, who worked for him at Axovant and later co-founded Kriya Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company.
Ramaswamy is a monotheistic Hindu. According to relatives, he is fluent in Tamil and understands (but does not speak) Malayalam. He is a vegetarian and wrote in 2020, "I believe it is wrong to kill sentient animals for culinary pleasure." According to his parents, he has tried to develop a good understanding of both Eastern and Western culture.
In 2023, Ramaswamy's campaign advisor said his net worth was more than $1 billion; Forbes estimated it at more than $950 million. He lived in Manhattan as of 2016. As of 2021, he owned a house in Butler County, Ohio, but in 2023, the only real estate he reported owning was a house in Columbus, Ohio, in Franklin County. A 2023 Politico profile of Ramaswamy mentions him living in a $2 million estate in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.
See also
In Spanish: Vivek Ramaswamy para niños
