Vivek Ramaswamy at the Georgia GOP Convention

Vivek Ramaswamy “tore up” the Geor­gia GOP con­ven­tion last week. I give him cred­it. He gave a great speech. Repub­li­cans talked about Vivek all week­end. I don’t know any­one who wasn’t impressed, even delight­ed, with Ramaswamy’s speech. But, to me, it was unset­tling that some­one I had nev­er heard of six weeks ago, could arise from the ether, be hand­ed the stage at the Colum­bus con­ven­tion, and over­whelm an audi­ence as he did. 

It was unset­tling because the last indi­vid­ual I saw do that was a young man by the name of Barack Oba­ma, who, sim­i­lar­ly, arrived out of nowhere, known by only a few insid­ers, was hand­ed cen­ter stage at the 2004 Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion, and like­wise “tore it up.” Four years lat­er Oba­ma became a sen­a­tor from Illi­nois. Four years after that, Oba­ma became Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. We know what hap­pened since. 

Thus, to say that I was a lit­tle appre­hen­sive about Mr. Ramaswamy would be an under­state­ment. I decid­ed to look into the man. Who is V. Ramaswamy? What is his sto­ry? How did he get all that mon­ey at age 37? What is his moti­va­tion? And why has he decid­ed to run for pres­i­dent, espe­cial­ly now? I had cer­tain sus­pi­cions. What I found out was dif­fer­ent than I orig­i­nal­ly imag­ined. So I hope you will come along with me as I take a deep dive into Vivek Ramaswamy to see what we can learn. 

Education and Early Career Experience

Vivek Ramaswamy is, or at least appears to be, a high­ly suc­cess­ful, 37 year old entre­pre­neur. By some esti­mates, he is worth over $600 mil­lion, by oth­ers, not so much. Born and raised in Ohio to par­ents who emi­grat­ed from India, at age 22 he grad­u­at­ed sum­ma cum laude in Biol­o­gy from Har­vard. Soon after grad­u­at­ing, how­ev­er, rather than pur­su­ing a career in his cho­sen field, Vivek piv­ot­ed, start­ing a career as a biotech analyst/investor at QVT Finan­cial, a promi­nent hedge fund. 

With his only cre­den­tial an under­grad­u­ate degree in biol­o­gy, at the time Vivek Ramaswamy began his job man­ag­ing hedge funds, he had no time or expe­ri­ence, no cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, no for­mal edu­ca­tion of finan­cial mar­kets, no expe­ri­ence in port­fo­lio man­age­ment, or asset allo­ca­tion exper­tise. The extent of Vivek’s involve­ment in hedge fund man­age­ment came to him by virtue of two sum­mer intern­ships while at Har­vard. The 19 year-old biol­o­gy major spent his first sum­mer intern­ing with a since-defunct nine-bil­lion-dol­lar hedge fund, Ama­ranth Advi­sors. Look­ing back, Vivek would tell inter­view­ers he opt­ed intern­ing at the hedge fund over biol­o­gy because, “the thought that work­ing in the firm’s biotech divi­sion, where a team of doc­tors and sci­en­tists eval­u­at­ed stocks for the firm to invest in, might be more excit­ing than work­ing in a lab.” Thus, accord­ing to Vivek, he makes deci­sions based on cer­tain hope for excitement. 

The sec­ond sum­mer Ramaswamy spent intern­ing at Gold­man Sachs, where he had lit­tle in the way of respon­si­bil­i­ty, lit­tle or no hedge fund invest­ment train­ing, and worked in an envi­ron­ment he lat­er referred as, “a cha­rade,” New York­er Mag­a­zine report­ing,

So, there you have the extent of Vivek Ramaswamy’s knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence in invest­ing and man­ag­ing hedge funds pri­or to tak­ing a job doing just that at QVT. 

Despite a lack of for­mal train­ing in finan­cial mat­ters, while man­ag­ing QVT invest­ments light­en­ing struck twice for the rook­ie hedge fund man­ag­er. In 2008 he began a pro­gram of buy­ing shares of a lit­tle known biotech com­pa­ny, Phar­mas­set, at $5/share. Three years lat­er, Phar­mas­set would be pur­chased by Gilead at $137/share. As one of the largest Phar­mas­set share­hold­ers by then, QVT did very well. Vivek worked his mag­ic a sec­ond time pur­chas­ing anoth­er small but promis­ing com­pa­ny, great­ly prof­it­ing QVT and becom­ing a part­ner in the firm as a result. Was that skill, or was that luck? 

Either way, man­ag­ing hedge funds did not prove as excit­ing as Vivek first imag­ined. To stim­u­late his demand­ing intel­lect, in 2010 while still work­ing at QVT, with the company’s bless­ing Vivek began moon­light­ing as a stu­dent of the law at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty. After three years, Vivek earned his degree, com­plet­ing a per­son­al project he would lat­er claim he under­took pure­ly “for the intel­lec­tu­al expe­ri­ence,” grad­u­at­ing in 2013 at age 28. To help pay for his intel­lec­tu­al expe­ri­ence, Vivek took advan­tage of a $90,000 schol­ar­ship from The Paul & Daisy Soros Fel­low­ships for New Amer­i­cans. Who is Paul Soros? Paul is George Soros’ broth­er. Does Vivek have a rela­tion­ship of some sort with the Soros fam­i­ly? We don’t know, but before announc­ing his pres­i­den­tial bid, con­cerned that any rela­tion­ship with Soros would tar­nish his image, Vivek paid a Wikipedia edi­tor to remove ref­er­ences to Soros, the edits com­plet­ed two weeks pri­or to his announcement. 

Thus, we know young Vivek Ramaswamy was a bril­liant Har­vard biol­o­gy stu­dent, who nev­er worked a day in biol­o­gy. And we know he was at least a com­pe­tent Yale law stu­dent, who nev­er took the bar exam and nev­er prac­ticed law, and who paid for his degree out of mon­ey received from George Soros’ broth­er. Final­ly, we know Vivek gets bored eas­i­ly, always look­ing for the next big thing to excite his sens­es and stim­u­late his intellect. 

Starting His First Company

Instead of pur­su­ing a career in law, with­in a year of grad­u­at­ing Yale, Vivek Ramaswamy opt­ed to put his tal­ents to work in a field in which he had no train­ing to speak of, and no expe­ri­ence, and very lit­tle appar­ent knowl­edge, the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try. He found­ed Roivant Sci­ences in 2014, to be a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal hold­ing com­pa­ny, serv­ing as its CEO until 2021. Vivek had the idea of tak­ing drug for­mu­la­tions pre­vi­ous­ly shelved by major phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies, estab­lish­ing var­i­ous cor­po­rate sub­sidiaries to to con­duct addi­tion­al research, under­take clin­i­cal tri­als, and if suc­cess­ful bring those drugs to mar­ket, pre­cise­ly the kind of activ­i­ty that could excite Vivek’s sens­abil­i­ties, at least for a while. 

Although Vivek had no expe­ri­ence run­ning a busi­ness at any lev­el, some­how he cap­i­tal­ized Roivant in an IPO, rais­ing $93 mil­lion from investors. And some­how, he recruit­ed sev­er­al well-known Demo­c­rat fig­ures to become board mem­bers, includ­ing for­mer Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader, Tom Daschle, for­mer Sec­re­tary of Health and Human Ser­vices under Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma, Kath­leen Sebe­lius, and for­mer admin­is­tra­tor of the Cen­ters for Medicare and Med­ic­aid Ser­vice, Don­ald Berwick. 

The first drug Vivek attempt­ed to bring to mar­ket was one pre­vi­ous­ly shelved by Glax­o­SmithK­line, one engi­neered to treat Alzheimer’s and oth­er cog­ni­tive dis­or­ders, for which he bought the rights to fur­ther devel­op, invest­ing $5 mil­lion. Vivek estab­lished an off­shore enti­ty in Bermu­da, Axo­vant, to own the for­mu­la­tion and per­form the work, sub­se­quent­ly cap­i­tal­iz­ing Axo­vant in the largest IPO ever under­tak­en, imme­di­ate­ly rais­ing over $300 mil­lion for the project. That was a remark­able amount to raise con­sid­er­ing Axo­vant had no mar­ketable prod­uct to sell, only the hope of devel­op­ing an effec­tive treat­ment for Alzheimer’s, a suc­cess­ful drug in that regard one of the the Holy Grails of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal research. Thus, right off the bat Vivek Ramaswamy went for the brass ring which oth­ers, bet­ter cap­i­tal­ized and more knowl­edge­able, had always fall­en short of grasping. 

It is dif­fi­cult not to notice the amount of unnat­ur­al, unfound­ed trust investors con­sis­tent­ly place in Vivek Ramaswamy. He had no train­ing in busi­ness, not even a child­hood paper route, had nev­er worked in busi­ness so much as a bag boy for a local gro­cery store, yet as he nav­i­gat­ed var­i­ous career paths, investors jumped at the chance of allow­ing him to man­age their hedge funds, and to give him mon­ey to start a busi­ness tasked with devel­op­ing a long shot drug the ini­tial devel­op­er, with deep pock­ets and the expe­ri­ence of Glax­o­SmithK­line, decid­ed would nev­er pan out. Vivek thought dif­fer­ent­ly and con­vinced investors to have faith in what he told them. So they gave him all that mon­ey based on a hunch. Quot­ing the New York­er,

Vivek Ramaswamy ran the worth of Axo­vant up to a report­ed $2.6 bil­lion, only to be told the dev­as­tat­ing news, the Alzheimer’s drug was just as Glasko fig­ured, a fail­ure. As a result, Axo­vant investors lost all of their mon­ey. Vivek told an inter­view­er, “It felt humiliating…I’d let peo­ple down. I took it hard.” Yes, Vivek may have tak­en it hard, but impor­tant­ly, Vivek lost no mon­ey, him­self. As CEO of the par­ent com­pa­ny, Vivek con­tin­ued to receive his com­pen­sa­tion while Axo­vant went bank­rupt, his investors left with nothing. 

Vivek’s Companies Generally Lose Money

For all his tout­ed suc­cess, Vivek Ramaswamy’s com­pa­nies, led by flag­ship Roivant, gen­er­al­ly oper­ate at a loss, For­tune Mag­a­zine recent­ly reporting, 

Despite loss­es in his com­pa­nies, accord­ing to his tax returns, Vivek does rea­son­ably well, Politi­co report­ing Vivek declared, “over $1 mil­lion in annu­al income for the first time in 2011, when he worked at QVT Finan­cial, and has since report­ed earn­ing more than $240 mil­lion, dri­ven by $174 mil­lion in cap­i­tal gains for 2020.”

Hav­ing built a per­son­al for­tune despite the unprof­itabil­i­ty of his com­pa­nies, Vivek ulti­mate­ly decid­ed to move on from Roivant day-to-day oper­a­tions. In ear­ly 2021, either vol­un­tar­i­ly or forced by the board, Vivek Ramaswamy stepped down as CEO, once again turn­ing his atten­tion to some­thing else, con­stant­ly search­ing for excite­ment and the next big thing. 

Striving for More Excitement

When one’s com­pa­nies are not doing well finan­cial­ly, what should one do? For Vivek Ramaswamy, the answer seems always to start anoth­er com­pa­ny. No longer inhib­it­ed by the chore of con­tin­u­ous­ly mar­ket­ing a lan­guish­ing biotech com­pa­ny to the world, in the third quar­ter of 2022, Ramaswamy announced the estab­lish­ment of his lat­est source of excite­ment and intel­lec­tu­al stim­u­la­tion, Strive Asset Man­age­ment. Strive rep­re­sents a new direc­tion for Ramaswamy, a piv­ot toward ide­o­log­i­cal­ly-based finan­cial man­age­ment. Designed to com­pete for investors by dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing itself from cor­po­rate “wokeism,” Strive’s allure is the prospect that polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive-mind­ed investors might believe con­ser­v­a­tive-mind­ed asset man­agers will bet­ter invest their mon­ey than woke man­agers. Is the busi­ness plan work­ing? So far, no. Com­pet­ing against the likes of Black­rock, Strive’s mar­ket pres­ence hard­ly mea­sures. Approach­ing the com­ple­tion of its first year in oper­a­tion, Strive’s assets under man­age­ment (AUM) are vir­tu­al­ly unchanged and appear to be trend­ing down­ward, in the red over $60 mil­lion since the start of 2023. 

Why Vivek Ramaswamy is Running for President

Strive may be Vivek’s last chance at notable, mid-scale entre­pre­neur­ship. Hav­ing failed, or at best stag­nat­ed in every cap­i­tal­ized ven­ture since his days at QVT, Ramaswamy’s strat­e­gy appears to be gin­ning busi­ness for Strive by becom­ing a polit­i­cal­ly-active per­son­al­i­ty in the 2024 pres­i­den­tial race, which he must know he has very lit­tle chance to win. To announce his inten­tion, ear­li­er this spring the charis­mat­ic Ramaswamy appeared on Fox News’ high­ly rat­ed Tuck­er Carl­son Show, declar­ing his run for the Pres­i­den­cy of the Unit­ed States. 

Polling at under 3% among Repub­li­cans, a lev­el which does not reg­is­ter on the graph below, con­ser­v­a­tive sup­port for Vivek Ramaswamy appears to be decreas­ing as rapid­ly as Strive’s AUM. 

Obvi­ous­ly, a can­di­date polling in 6th posi­tion, next to last, against all chal­lengers to a pop­u­lar, well-fund­ed, pre­vi­ous pres­i­dent, will have a dif­fi­cult path to nav­i­gate to occu­py the Oval Office. That being the case, why is Vivek Ramaswamy run­ning for Pres­i­dent? Two rea­sons appear obvi­ous. First of all, Vivek Ramaswamy bores eas­i­ly. As he has told us and demon­strat­ed many times, Vivek craves excite­ment. A pres­i­den­tial run excites him. But sec­ond­ly, Strive may be his last chance at suc­cess in the Wall Street lev­el finan­cial world. Vivek sees a pres­i­den­tial run as a way to ener­gize a com­pa­ny in search of a polit­i­cal­ly-con­ser­v­a­tive clien­tele. Vivek Ramaswamy knows he is not a seri­ous con­tender to become Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States, at least not any­time soon. There­fore, the only moti­va­tion remain­ing would be just that, to use a pres­i­den­tial run as a source of per­son­al excite­ment, and to lure con­ser­v­a­tive-mind­ed investors toward his con­ser­v­a­tive-mind­ed asset man­age­ment com­pa­ny. There you go. 

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Mistaken Political Beliefs

In a recent tweet, Vivek Ramaswamy offered a video explain­ing his inter­pre­ta­tion of the prin­ci­ples of America’s found­ing, which he claims are respon­si­ble for safe-guard­ing human free­dom. Here is the truth Vivek pro­posed to his audience: 

But in his speech, Vivek pro­posed a truth which is not what Thomas Jef­fer­son knew at all. Nei­ther Jef­fer­son, nor any of our found­ing fathers, would agree that free­dom depends on a belief in some gener­ic, unde­fined high­er pow­er. Jef­fer­son and America’s founders pro­fessed faith in the pow­er of “the most Holy and undi­vid­ed Trin­i­ty,” and that it is that spe­cif­ic high­er pow­er Who has the capac­i­ty to free mankind, none oth­er. In fact, our founders would agree that any oth­er pro­posed high­er pow­er would be pur­posed toward the enslave­ment and destruc­tion of mankind. 

Vivek Ramaswamy pro­fess­es Hin­du faith. He has every right in Amer­i­ca to do so. How­ev­er, the “laws of nature and of nature’s God,” as Thomas Jef­fer­son wrote in the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, and to which Vivek refers, are not the laws of any Hin­du gods, Brah­ma, Vish­nu, Shi­va, Devi, Krish­na, Lak­sh­mi, and Saraswati. They are the laws of God of the Bible. That’s very different. 

Explain­ing the dif­fer­ence, while faith in the Holy Trin­i­ty led the Amer­i­can founders to endorse the prin­ci­ple, “All men are cre­at­ed equal,” Hin­dus, faith­ful toward a dif­fer­ent set of beliefs, pro­fess that Brah­ma cre­at­ed men to live with­in a caste sys­tem in which the social hier­ar­chy is deter­mined by birth and by name, to the extent that cer­tain indi­vid­u­als are so infe­ri­or as to be untouch­able by even the low­est caste. Fur­ther­more, Ramaswamy is a Brah­man, the high­est caste in the Hin­du social hier­ar­chy. Accord­ing to New York­er Mag­a­zine,

Thus, Vivek Ramaswamy is a walk­ing, talk­ing con­tra­dic­tion. He admits a sense of deep-seat­ed supe­ri­or­i­ty to aver­age peo­ple, while claim­ing the prin­ci­ples of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, pro­claim­ing equal­i­ty among all, to be his own. In his pro­nounce­ments, he sub­verts the Amer­i­can found­ing, trans­form­ing its mean­ing to bet­ter fit his per­son­al world view, and in the process co-opt­ing unknowl­edge­able Chris­tians to agree with his inter­pre­ta­tion, and per­haps pro­vid­ing a more accept­able, gener­ic view of the Amer­i­can prin­ci­ples to those who are not of Chris­t­ian faith. That’s all very clever, but also very dishonest. 

On anoth­er issue, in a recent online inter­view Vivek Ramaswamy dis­played full igno­rance of the prob­lem of US debt, as well as any real solu­tion, claim­ing sim­ply, “The print­ing of mon­ey hap­pens at the US Trea­sury.” But the US Trea­sury does not print mon­ey at all. The US Trea­sury does not cre­ate mon­ey in any form or fash­ion. And that is pre­cise­ly the prob­lem with the debt and our con­tin­ued gov­ern­ment deficits. The US Trea­sury only cre­ates DEBT, sad­dling it on the backs of the Amer­i­can peo­ple, debt which is used as col­lat­er­al on the bal­ance sheet of the New York Region­al Fed­er­al Reserve Bank in a process by which pri­vate Wall Street banks loan mon­ey into exis­tence, col­lat­er­al­ized by future Amer­i­can tax pro­ceeds. The entire US mon­ey sup­ply is pay­ing inter­est to those banks. Pre­cise­ly because the US Trea­sury DOES NOT “print mon­ey,” as opposed to what Ramaswamy believes, is the rea­son for the accu­mu­la­tion of unpayable pub­lic and pri­vate Amer­i­can debt. 

So even if one is drawn to the pres­i­den­tial can­di­da­cy of Vivek Ramaswamy, please know that there is noth­ing he might do to rem­e­dy the prob­lem of US debt, under­stand­ing mon­ey-cre­ation process as he does. 

Conclusion

When I began my exam­i­na­tion of pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Vivek Ramaswamy, because he was such a long shot, I tend­ed to believe he was being put up to it by cer­tain oth­ers inter­est­ed in dilut­ing Don­ald Trump’s sup­port, as so many in the Repub­li­can field of can­di­dates have been. I fig­ured he was like­ly just anoth­er ‘con­trolled oppo­si­tion’ can­di­date. But what I dis­cov­ered is an extreme­ly com­plex indi­vid­ual, flawed like any­one else, whose moti­va­tions are not nec­es­sar­i­ly as adver­tised. Vivek Ramaswamy has suc­cess­ful­ly brand­ed him­self a young, bril­liant exec­u­tive wor­thy of the office of Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. He has done so by cre­at­ing com­pa­ny after com­pa­ny, lever­ag­ing their resources in ways to cre­ate and exploit oppor­tu­ni­ties for his own enrich­ment. While his com­pa­nies rarely make mon­ey, Vivek does. While this young man has made a mod­est for­tune by today’s stan­dards, he appears to have made it on the backs of investors who have them­selves lost mon­ey invest­ing in his com­pa­nies. Vivek Ramaswamy is a born sales­man, well-spo­ken, using his com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills to con­vince oth­ers to do as he directs and to have con­fi­dence that he knows what he is doing, when, appar­ent­ly, he does not. Gen­er­al­ly, Vivek Ramaswamy busi­ness ven­tures fail, or at best lan­guish. Now and then (although it has been quite a while) he hits a home run, which feeds the sto­ry he uses to con­vince each next set of investors. 

Should we elect the Vivek Ramaswamy media per­son­al­i­ty, with all his strengths and weak­ness­es, and place him in the Oval Office as Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States, would he be bet­ter than with Joe Biden? Per­haps. But the Vivek Ramaswamy per­son­al­i­ty I see is inward-focused. What he does is for him, not any­one else, not the Amer­i­can peo­ple. That is because the wel­fare of the Amer­i­can peo­ple is not what rewards him. Excite­ment rewards him, he admits that. Mov­ing for­ward to the next unknown expe­ri­ence rewards him, we see that in his his­to­ry. Risk excites him, we see that in his his­to­ry. Down­play­ing risk to oth­ers, while gain­ing and cap­i­tal­iz­ing on their trust, rewards him finan­cial­ly, we see that in his his­to­ry as well. 

So, in the end do you want Vivek Ramaswamy to be your next Pres­i­dent? I don’t think you are going to have to wor­ry about it, I just thought you ought to know.