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Vivek Ramaswamy — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Roivant Sciences and subsidiaries

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 pension fund of the California State Teachers' Retirement System. 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.

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 said 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.

In August 2026, a federal judge declined to dismiss a whistleblower lawsuit against Ramaswamy stemming from his tenure at Strive. Former Strive executive Joyce Rosely alleged that Ramaswamy and other executives pressured her to engage in securities-law violations and that she was fired after objecting to the alleged conduct. The ruling allowed her whistleblower retaliation claims to proceed, without determining whether the alleged securities-law violations occurred.

2024 presidential campaign

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. 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.