Vivek Ramaswamy (American Entrepreneur) Biography

Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy (born August 9, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and presidential candidate. He founded Roivant Sciences, a pharmaceutical company, in 2014. In February 2023, Vivek Ramaswamy declared his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination in the 2024 United States presidential election. Ramaswamy was born in Cincinnati to Indian immigrant parents. He graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor’s degree in biology and later earned a J.D. 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.

Vivek Ramaswamy Personal Info

Vivek Ramaswamy Early life

On August 9, 1985, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Indian Hindu immigrant parents welcomed Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy into the world. His family are Keralan Brahmins who speak Tamil.  His mother, Geetha Ramaswamy, a graduate of the Mysore Medical College & Research Institute, was employed as a geriatric psychiatrist, while his father, V. Ganapathy Ramaswamy, a graduate of the National Institute of Technology Calicut, was employed by General Electric as an engineer and patent attorney. His parents left the family’s ancestral house, a traditional agraharam in the town of Vadakkencherry, in the Keralan district of Palakkad.

In Ohio, vivek Ramaswamy was reared. When he was younger, Ramaswamy and his family would frequently visit the nearby Hindu temple in Dayton. His social beliefs were also shaped by his private piano lessons from elementary school through high school, taught by a conservative Christian. He and his parents traveled to India on numerous summer vacations. Ramaswamy was a nationally ranked tennis player in high school.

Vivek Ramaswamy Education

vivek Ramaswamy completed his eighth grade education in public schools. After that, he attended Cincinnati’s St. Xavier High School, a Jesuit-affiliated Catholic institution, where he graduated in 2003 as valedictorian. Ramaswamy was a Phi Beta Kappa member and received a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in biology from Harvard University in 2007. He had a reputation as a brazen and self-assured libertarian at Harvard. He joined the Harvard Political Union and went on to become its president . He said to The Harvard Crimson that he enjoyed debating and saw himself as a contrarian. Under the stage name and alter ego “Da Vek,” he performed Eminem covers and libertarian-themed rap songs while attending college. He also interned at Goldman Sachs and Amaranth Advisors, two hedge funds. He won the Bowdoin Prize for his senior thesis, which examined the moral issues brought up by the development of human-animal chimeras.

The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans granted Ramaswamy a post-graduate fellowship in 2011, which he utilized to enroll in Yale Law School Subsequently, Ramaswamy claimed that his involvement in the biotech, pharmaceutical, and financial sectors had made him wealthy before he even attended Yale; in 2023, he claimed to have had a net worth of almost $15 million before he even finished law school. He made future US Senator J. D. Vance a buddy at Yale. In 2013, he obtained his Juris Doctor. Ramaswamy stated in a 2023 interview that, when a law student, he belonged to the Shabtai, a Jewish intellectual discussion club on campus.

Vivek Ramaswamy Career

Co-founding Campus Venture Network in 2007 with Travis May, vivek Ramaswamy and May released a private social networking platform for college students hoping to start their own businesses. In 2009, the business was sold to the charitable Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

From 2007 to 2014, Ramaswamy was employed at QVT Financial, a hedge firm. He co-managed the biotech portfolio for the company as a partner. Under Ramaswamy, QVT invested in biotech companies, including Palatin Technologies, Concert Pharmaceuticals, Pharmasset, and Retrophin, a venture led by Martin Shkreli. Ramaswamy referred to Shkreli, whose company had significantly raised the price of a life-saving medication, as both “brilliant” and a pathological liar in a speech from 2023 and in his book Woke Inc. He denounced Shkreli’s fraud as a victimless crime and attacked the US Department of Justice for pursuing legal action against him.

In the 1970s, vivek Ramaswamy’s father, an engineer and patent attorney at General Electric, and his mother, a geriatric psychiatrist, immigrated to the US from Kerala, India. Growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, Ramaswamy was born in 1985; his younger brother Shankar was born in 1989. Ramaswamy was the valedictorian of his Jesuit high school class and a highly rated junior tennis player. Upon completing his biology bachelor’s degree at Harvard University in 2007, he began working for a hedge fund, where he earned $7 million over the course of seven years. After graduating from Yale University in 2013 with a law degree, he met Apoorva Tewari, a medical student who would eventually become a throat surgeon, and became engaged to her. In 2014, at the age of 29, Ramaswamy began Roivant Sciences is a pharmaceutical organisation. He had received at least a quarter of a million dollars in personal revenue from the business by 2023.

Vivek Ramaswamy Net Worth

Vivek Ramaswamy, a prominent American entrepreneur, has amassed a significant fortune of $950 million through his thriving career in business and entrepreneurship. He is the visionary behind multiple multimillion-dollar enterprises and has demonstrated his leadership prowess as the CEO of Roivant Sciences, a distinguished biotech company.

Roivant Sciences And Subsidiaries

Ramaswamy established Roivant Sciences, a biotechnology company, in 2014. The term “Roi” stands for return on investment. The company obtained about $100 million in start-up money from QVT and other investors, which included RA money Management, Visium Asset Management, D. E. Shaw & Co., and Falcon Edge Capital. The company was incorporated in Bermuda, a tax haven. Roivant’s plan was to buy patents for pharmaceuticals that hadn’t been successfully developed from bigger pharmaceutical corporations and then release them onto the market. The company established other subsidiaries, such as China-based Sinovant and Cytovant, targeted at the Asian market, Urovant, focused on urological diseases, and Dermavant, focused on dermatology.

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 an initial public offering (IPO) in Axovant. Axovant became a “Wall Street darling” and raised $315 million in its IPO. 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.

Also Read : Pratibha Patil (Former President of India) Biography!

The company declared in September 2017 that intepirdine had not succeeded in the large-scale clinical trial. The company’s value fell; it lost 75% of its value in a single day and kept falling after that. Several institutional investors, including the pension fund of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, were among the shareholders that suffered financial losses. Because he held his interest through Roivant, Ramaswamy was shielded from a large portion of Axovant’s losses. The business gave up on intepirdine. In 2018, Ramaswamy stated that he was not sorry about the way the company managed the drug; in later years, he expressed sadness about the result but expressed annoyance at the company’s criticism. Axovant failed in its 2023 attempt to rebrand as a gene treatment firm .

Ramaswamy became executive chairman of Roivant Sciences in January 2021 after resigning as CEO. Following his departure as CEO in 2021, Roivant underwent a reverse merger with Montes Archimedes Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition vehicle, to become a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq.Ramaswamy left his position as Roivant’s chair in February 2023 in order to concentrate on his presidential candidacy. Ramaswamy continues to own a 7.17% stake in Roivant, making him the sixth-largest stakeholder .Roivant has never turned a profit .

Activism and Strive Asset Management

Early in 2022, Ramaswamy and Anson Frericks, a buddy from high school, co-founded Strive Asset Management, an asset management company based in Columbus, Ohio. About $20 million was raised by the company from outside investors, who included Bill Ackman, J. D. Vance, and Peter Thiel .

Strive has positioned itself as “anti-woke,” and its funds as “anti-ESG.” According to Ramaswamy, the biggest asset managers, like State Street, Vanguard, and BlackRock, combine business and politics surrounding ESG to the harm of investors in their funds.

When deciding what to include in a portfolio, pension fund managers consider environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors when assessing long-term risk For years, Ramaswamy has opposed ESG. and places a strong emphasis on Milton Friedman’s renowned shareholder primacy theory. In his book Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice System, Woke, Inc. He has portrayed socially conscious investments made by private firms as both ineffectual and the biggest threat to American society in Scam and other places. Just a few months prior to declaring his candidacy for president, in September 2022, he published his second book, Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.

The exchange-traded fund (ETF) DRLL, the flagship fund of Strive, debuted in 2022 as a “anti-woke” energy sector index investment. Energy corporations would be forced by Strive, according to Ramaswamy, to frack for more natural gas and dig for more oil, and to “do whatever allows them to be most successful over the long run without regard to political, social, cultural, or environmental agendas.”

State Treasurer Curtis Loftis arranged for Ramaswamy to meet behind closed doors with lawmakers in October 2022. It was during these sessions that Ramaswamy made a proposal to Strive about managing pension funds in South Carolina. Following a revelation by The Post and Courier in June 2023, the meetings were criticized for being an unregistered form of lobbying; however, Ramaswamy’s campaign manager refuted any improper behavior. Prior to his resignation in, Ramaswamy served as executive chairman of Strive. will concentrate on his presidential candidacy in February 2023.

Presidential Campaign (2023–present)

Ramaswamy stated that while he abstained from voting in the presidential contests of 2008, 2012, and 2016, he cast his ballot for Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party’s 2004 nominee. During this time, he defined himself as apolitical. In the 2020 presidential election, he backed Donald Trump. While registering to vote in Franklin County, Ohio, in November 2021, Ramaswamy identified as “unaffiliated” but said he was a Republican.

Ramaswamy has given to both Republicans and Democrats in politics. He gave $2,700 to Florida Democrat Dena Grayson’s congressional campaign in 2016. He gave $30,000 to the Ohio Republican Party between 2020 and 2023. Ramaswamy contemplated entering the Ohio U.S. Senate race in 2022.

Campaign

Ramaswamy said on Tucker Carlson Tonight on February 21, 2023, that he would be running for the Republican nomination for US president in 2024. He encouraged his primary opponents to follow suit by making public the last 20 years of his individual income tax records. The great bulk of his campaign’s funding has come from his money. After loaning his campaign around $15 million between February and July of 2023, Ramaswamy’s campaign had approximately $9 million in cash at the conclusion of the second quarter of 2023. Although he raised a lot less money than Ron DeSantis and Trump, he was nonetheless ahead of most other Republican primary contenders During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Ramaswamy has 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. Ramaswamy has attacked secularism in interviews and campaign events, stating that he believes in one God and that the United States was established on Judeo-Christian or Christian principles.

Before declaring his candidacy, Ramaswamy paid an editor to change his Wikipedia biography; nevertheless, his team refuted claims that the alterations were made for political reasons. This was acknowledged in May 2023. References to Ramaswamy’s postgraduate fellowship from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and his participation in the Ohio COVID-19 Response Team were deleted from the Wikipedia biography. American conservatives have long conjectured about the identity of businessman and social activist George Soros, the brother of businessman and activist Daisy Soros, and his sister-in-law. The campaign for Ramaswamy denied trying to “scrub” his Wikipedia page, claiming that the changes were adjustments made to “factual distortions.”

Vivek Ramaswamy Foreign Affairs

Ramaswamy said he would not use U.S. military force against Iran. In November 2023, he condemned Azerbaijan’s military operation against the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh and said that the U.S. should block all its military aid to Azerbaijan.

Ramaswamy favors “some major concessions to Russia, including freezing those current lines of control in a Korean-war style armistice agreement” to end the Russo-Ukrainian War. He favors ending U.S. military aid to Ukraine, excluding Ukraine from NATO, and allowing Russia to remain in occupied regions of Ukraine in exchange for an agreement that Russia end its alliance with China. He has expressed support for Taiwanese independence, and floated the idea of “putting a gun in every Taiwanese household” to deter an invasion by China, but said the U.S. should not militarily defend Taiwan from Chinese attack after the U.S. has achieved “semiconductor independence”, which he pledged to achieve by 2028.

After Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Ramaswamy said that Israel has “a right to defend itself” and to make its own decisions for its defense, while the U.S. should provide a “diplomatic Iron Dome” for Israel, but also said that U.S. aid to Israel should be contingent upon Israel’s plans for defeating Hamas and its actions in Gaza.

Vivek Ramaswamy Political Positions

Despite their competition for the Republican candidacy in 2024, Ramaswamy openly backs Trump. Ramaswamy swiftly backed Trump upon his indictment on federal criminal charges in 2023. Should Trump win the presidency, he vows to pardon him. In addition, he has pledged to pardon Edward Snowden, Ross Ulbricht, and Julian Assange. He made a suggestion that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. be taken into consideration as a potential running mate.

Executive Power And Social/Economic Policy

Ramaswamy has pledged to revoke Executive Order 11246 and is against affirmative action. He has maintained that the American form of capitalism offers an alternative to the caste system in India. He claims that pupils in public schools have been brainwashed by critical race theory.

Ramaswamy calls abortion “murder” and is against it . Though he is against a federal ban, he is in favor of state-level prohibitions on six-week abortions, with exceptions for rape, incest, and danger to the woman’s life.

LGBTQ advocacy has been referred to as a “cult” by Ramaswamy Through a spokesperson, he stated that, while he favors substantial restrictions on the rights of transgender Americans, he has used anti-trans rhetoric and feels that same-sex marriage is “settled precedent”.

In an unprecedented move for a modern American president, Ramaswamy has promised, if elected, to govern by executive fiat. In addition to firing 75% of federal employees, he has also promised to abolish at least five federal agencies, including the Education Department, FBI, ATF, IRS, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, as well as dismantle civil service protections and make employment at-will. Reference 100 His pledge is to “expose and ultimately gut” the Food and Drug Administration, which he has labeled as “corrupt”. He claims that the president can unilaterally dissolve agencies by executive order. However, executive agencies and departments are established by statute, and Congress is granted the authority of the purse under the Constitution. He has advocated for an eight-year tenure for all public servants and promised to annul President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10988, which grants government employees the ability to engage in collective bargaining. He suggests doing away with the federal statute mandating that presidents spend all of the funds that Congress appropriates.

Vivek Ramaswamy Personal life

Apoorva Tewari Ramaswasya, the laryngologist and surgeon spouse of Ramaswamy, met him at Yale while he was doing his legal studies and she was pursuing her medical degree. After getting married in 2015, they have two boys. Shankar, Ramaswamy’s younger brother, was his employee at Axovant before he co-founded the biotech startup Kriya Therapeutics.

Hinduism’s Ramaswamy is monotheistic. Relatives claim that he speaks Tamil with ease and knows Malayalam but not speaks it. He stated in 2020 that “I believe it is wrong to kill sentient animals for culinary pleasure” and is a vegetarian According to a campaign advisor for Ramaswamy in 2023, his net worth exceeded $1 billion; nonetheless, Forbes estimated it to be more than $950 million. As of 2016, he was a Manhattan resident.

By 2021 he owned a home in Butler County, Ohio, but as of 2023, the only property he listed as his own was a home in Franklin County, Columbus, Ohio. Ramaswamy is mentioned as residing in a $2 million mansion in the Upper Arlington area of Columbus in a 2023 Politico feature.

Vivek Ramaswamy Wife

Vivek Ramaswamy Wife. The student is true Vivek Ramaswewamy is indeed married to Apoorva Tewari. She is an otolaryngologist. Karthik and Arjun are the names of their two kids.

Vivek Ramaswamy, Arrested

A 30-year-old man has been arrested and charged in connection with death threats aimed at Indian-American Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and his campaign event attendees, the US attorney’s office in New Hampshire has said.

The attorney’s office on Monday said Tyler Anderson of Dover in New Hampshire was arrested on Saturday and charged with transmitting in interstate commerce a threat to injure Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur.

According to an FBI affidavit, the Ramaswamy campaign sent a text message on Friday to notify voters, including Anderson, about an upcoming campaign event in Portsmouth. Anderson allegedly responded to the message: “Great, another opportunity for me to blow his brains out!” He also said: “I’m going to kill everyone who attends” and added a vulgar description of what he would do to the bodies.

While the statement from the US attorney’s office did not name which presidential campaign was targeted, Ramaswamy’s team confirmed on Monday that he was the target, The Washington Post reported. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Ramaswamy campaign, said on Monday: “Unfortunately it is true.”     We are grateful to law enforcement for their swiftness and professionalism in handling this matter and pray for the safety of all Americans,” she added.

A statement from his staff then criticised the news media, “deranged voices” and “left-wing cranks”, accusing the groups of inciting violence against the Republicans ahead of the 2024 presidential elections. I’m grateful to the people on the front lines who work hard every day to make sure people like me and other Americans keep safe,” Ramaswamy told reporters in New Hampshire While searching Anderson’s phone, the affidavit says, authorities discovered the texts to Ramaswamy in a deleted folder and found additional threatening messages to another candidate.

According to the affidavit, one message sent on Wednesday said: “Fantastic, now I know where to go so I can blow that b——’s head off.”  Subsequent texts were referring to “a mass shooting” and intentions to defile a corpse. Anderson admitted to sending the text messages to Ramaswamy and confirmed that he sent threatening texts to other campaigns, according to the affidavit. A businessman and a Republican presidential candidate, Ramaswamy went on to hold the event in Portsmouth on Monday. If convicted, Anderson could face five years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a USD 2,50,000 fine.

Threats of violence against politicians are up, Forbes cited a recent University of Massachusetts-Amherst survey of nearly 300 former members of Congress as suggesting. The survey found 47 per cent reported receiving threats while in Congress, with those who were first elected more recently experiencing a higher number of threats than those first elected earlier. The numbers were split fairly evenly across party lines, but women and people of colour reported receiving threats at a much higher rate of 69 per cent, Forbes reported.

Vivek Ramaswamy compares US VP Kamala Harris

American presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy campaigned in Iowa ahead of the Jan 15 Republican Party primaries in the state. Comparing ousted Harvard President Claudine Gay with US VP Kamala Harris, Ramaswamy drew two lessons from the controversy. Watch the video to know more.