Vivek G. Ramaswamy (born August 9, 1985) is an American entrepreneur, author, and conservative political activist.
After working as an
investment partner, he founded
the biopharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences in 2014.
Since 2020, he has been writing and speaking out against stakeholder
capitalism, big tech censorship, and critical race theory. He left Roivant in 2021 and published Woke, Inc.:
Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam in August 2021. In
2022, he co-founded Strive Asset Management, an investment firm opposed
to environmental, social, and corporate governance, where he currently
serves as the Executive Chairman, and published Nation of Victims:
Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence in
September.
Ramaswamy was dubbed
"The C.E.O. of Anti-Woke, Inc." in a 2022 New Yorker profile, and
has been described as "one of the intellectual godfathers of the anti-woke
movement" by Politico in 2023. On February 21, 2023 Ramaswamy announced his decision to run
in the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries on Tucker
Carlson Tonight.
Early life and
education
Ramaswamy was born in
1985 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised there. His parents immigrated
from Vadakkencherry, Palakkad, Kerala, India. His father graduated from a regional
engineering college in Kerala, and worked for General Electric as an
engineer and patent attorney, while his mother graduated from Mysore
Medical College and worked as a geriatric psychiatrist. Ramaswamy has argued that American-style
capitalism provides an antidote to the caste system in India by offering
lower-caste citizens more economic opportunities.
Ramaswamy graduated
from St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati in 2003. In high school, he was class valedictorian,
a nationally ranked junior tennis player, and an accomplished pianist.
In 2007, Ramaswamy
graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude and Phi
Beta Kappa with an A.B. in biology. He wrote his senior thesis on the ethical
questions raised by creating human-animal chimeras. His thesis was awarded the Bowdoin Prize
for Natural Sciences, and a precis was published in The New York Times and The
Boston Globe in 2007. In 2013,
Ramaswamy received a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Business career
In 2007, Ramaswamy
and Travis May co-founded Campus Venture Network, a technology
company that provided software and networking resources to university
entrepreneurs. The company was acquired in 2009 by the Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation. Ramaswamy worked at
QVT Financial from 2007 to 2014, where he was a partner and co-managed the
firm's biotech portfolio, while simultaneously attending Yale Law School from
2010-2013.
Roivant Sciences
In 2014, Ramaswamy
founded the pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, a company that
focuses on applying technology to drug development, for which he served as CEO
until 2021. Ramaswamy appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine in
2015 for his work in drug development. In 2020, Ramaswamy co-founded
Chapter Medicare, the only consumer-first Medicare navigation platform.
In early 2021,
Ramaswamy stepped down as CEO of Roivant Sciences to publish Woke,
Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam, which debuted at #2
on The New York Times bestseller list.
Strive Asset Management
Ramaswamy is currently
co-founder and executive chairman of Strive Asset Management, an Ohio-based
asset management firm that was backed financially by Peter Thiel and J.
D. Vance, among others. Strive was established to offer an alternative to
larger asset managers like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard,
which Ramaswamy has criticized for engaging in environmental, social, and
governance (ESG) activities, and mixing business with politics to the
alleged detriment of shareholders.
Strive's total assets
under management surpassed $500 million on November 11, 2022, three months
after the launch of its first fund. In January 2023, Strive launched a
proxy advisory service to compete with such mainstream firms as Glass
Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services. Ramaswamy has
been described by Axios and Bloomberg as "the leading anti-ESG
crusader."
Nonprofit work
Ramaswamy has served on
the boards of directors of The Philanthropy Roundtable, an organization
that aims to "foster excellence in philanthropy, protect philanthropic
freedom and help donors advance liberty, opportunity and personal
responsibility." He also has served on the board of directors for The
Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FreOpp), a nonprofit think tank
focused on expanding economic opportunity to those who least have it. In
2021, he became a member of the Board of Trustees of St. Xavier High School.
Books
- — (August 17, 2021). Woke,
Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam. New York, NY: Center
Street. ISBN 978-1-5460-9078-6. OCLC 1237631944.
Woke, Inc. debuted at #2 on the New York Times Best
Sellers list on September 5, 2021. A critique of "stakeholder
capitalism," it argues that corporations' "woke" efforts to
advance social causes "robs us of our money, our voice, and our
identity." Reviewers cited Ramaswamy's "spot-on analyses of
corrosive corporate duplicity" and "important points about the
misguided nature of ESG investing [and] the folly of attempting to inject
politics into business." Russell Greene, writing on Real
Clear Markets, applauded the book’s timeliness and said that "the
problems Ramaswamy describes are real and likely to get worse," while also
arguing that the author "[did] not permit his ample experience to inform
his theory," leading him to present "a vision for business that
overlooks how corporations, and corporate law, actually work." Joe
Berkowitz, on Fast Company, observes that Ramaswamy "often
seems more concerned with so-called wokeness itself than with woke
corporations." The book significantly raised Ramaswamy's profile,
leading to frequent talk show appearances, especially on Fox News.
- — (September 13, 2022). Nation
of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to
Excellence. New York, NY: Center Street. ISBN 978-1-5460-02963. OCLC 1546002960.
In Nation of
Victims, Ramaswamy critiques what he sees as the victimhood culture that is
at the heart of America’s decline. Using examples from history, and
incorporating themes from Western philosophy and Eastern theology, Ramaswamy
suggests that the disappearance of excellence and exceptionalism, which he
identifies as being at the heart of American identity, has left a deep moral
and cultural vacuum in the nation. In his review for The Wall Street
Journal, Tunku Varadarajan says that Nation of Victims makes
a "passionate, persuasive case" for "closing off victimhood as a
path to success." Comparing it to the work of Shelby Steele and John
McWhorter’s Woke Racism, Varadarajan writes
Nation of Victims—always vigorous, in places uncompromising—offers a
surprisingly wistful, even docile, solution to America’s problem of victimhood.
We’re locked in a "grievance-fueled race to the bottom," where the
very language we use—including basic words like "woman" and
"equality"—have [sic] paralyzed dialogue across
partisan lines. How do we emerge from this civic hell of mutual
incomprehension? Mr. Ramaswamy’s answer is that we must "find a way to forgive
each other instead of trying to win at the game of playing the victim."
That sounds like a very fine idea.
Political involvement
Main article: Vivek
Ramaswamy 2024 presidential campaign
Ramaswamy has proposed
repealing a law which makes Presidents spend all the money congress
appropriates. He rejects the Diversity, equity, and inclusion and
environmental, social, and governance movements.
In 2022, Ramaswamy
considered a candidacy in the 2022 United States Senate election in Ohio. In
2023, it was reported that Ramaswamy might run for President of the United
States in the 2024 election. According to a profile in Politico,
Ramaswamy was inspired by Donald Trump's victory in the 2016
presidential election, and wants to run "with an entrepreneurial spirit,
unorthodox ideas, and few expectations" in the hopes of building "a
major following that will carry him to the presidency.
Ramaswamy announced
that he would run in the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries on
the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight on February
21, 2023. Ramaswamy is a self-described
conservative.
Personal life
Ramaswamy met his wife
Apoorva T. Ramaswamy, an Assistant Professor and clinician at the Ohio
State University Wexner Medical Center, when they lived near each other
at Yale University, where they were studying law and medicine,
respectively. Together, they have two sons. Ramaswamy is Hindu.
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