Read about Vivek Ramaswamy net worth, age, wife, children, height, family, parents, salary, businesses and party as well as other information you need to know.
Introduction
Vivek Ramaswamy is an American entrepreneur and candidate in the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries. Ramaswamy worked as an investment partner at a hedge fund before founding a biotech company, Roivant Sciences, in 2014. He stepped down as CEO of Roivant in 2021 but remained its chairman until 2023.
Ramaswamy co-founded Strive Asset Management in 2022, an investment firm that positions itself in opposition to environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) initiatives. In February 2023, Ramaswamy declared his candidacy for the Republican Party’s nomination for president in the 2024 election. Ramaswamy rose to prominence in American conservative circles as an anti-woke activist.
He started his campaign claiming that the United States is in the middle of a national identity crisis precipitated by what he called “new secular religions like COVID-ism, climate-ism, and gender ideology”. He is also a critic of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) initiatives.
Early life
| Name | Vivek Ramaswamy |
| Net Worth | $1.5 billion |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
| Age | 38 years |
| Height | 1.75m |
Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy was born on August 9, 1985 (age 38 years) in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He is the son of Hindu Tamil immigrant parents. He was raised in Ohio His family is from Kerala. His father, V. Ganapathy Ramaswamy, a graduate of the National Institute of Technology Calicut, worked as an engineer and patent attorney for General Electric, while his mother, Geetha Ramaswamy, a graduate of the Mysore Medical College & Research Institute, worked as a geriatric psychiatrist.
Ramaswamy’s parents immigrated from Palakkad district in Kerala, where the family had an ancestral home in a traditional agraharam in the town of Vadakkencherry. Growing up, Ramaswamy often attended the local Hindu temple in Dayton, Ohio, 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.
He attended public schools through the eighth grade. He then attended Cincinnati’s St. Xavier High School, a Catholic school affiliated with the Jesuit order, graduating in 2003. In 2007, Ramaswamy graduated from Harvard College 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.
Vivek Ramaswamy 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 the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
He wrote his senior thesis on the ethical questions raised by creating human-animal chimeras and earned a Bowdoin Prize. An op-ed by Ramaswamy summarizing his thesis was published by the Boston Globe and republished in the New York Times. In a 2023 interview, he also said that he was a member of the Jewish intellectual society Shabtai in college.
In 2011, Ramaswamy was awarded a post-graduate fellowship by the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. In 2013, he earned a J.D. from Yale Law School. At that time, Ramaswamy was already wealthy from his involvement 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.
Business career
Vivek Ramaswamy and Travis May co-founded Campus Venture Network in 2007, which published a private social networking website for university students who aspired to launch a business. The company was sold in 2009 to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. 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 and Concert Pharmaceuticals.
Ramaswamy’s “buy low, sell high strategy” led to QVT’s success in investing in Pharmasset in 2008 for $5 a share; Gilead purchased the company at $137 a share in 2011, awarding QVT, Pharmasset’s largest shareholder. In 2014, Ramaswamy founded the biotechnology firm Roivant Sciences to revolutionize drug development. The FDA approved six drugs developed at Vants and launched by Roivant, including VTAMA, to treat plaque psoriasis, in 2022.
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 (which focused on dermatology), Urovant (which focused on urological disease), and China-based Sinovant and Cytovant, which 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,[41] 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.
Vivek Ramaswamy appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine 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 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 tax year 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 attempted to reinvent itself as a gene therapy company but dissolved in 2023. 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.
Vivek 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 in 2023, Ramaswamy called himself a “scientist” and said, “I developed a number of medicines.” Although his undergraduate degree is in biology, he was never a scientist; his role in the biotechnology industry was that of a financier and entrepreneur.
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. Roivant has never been profitable.
In 2020, when Ramaswamy was CEO of Roivant Sciences, the company established a nonprofit social-impact arm, Roivant Social Ventures (RSV), with his support. A prior iteration of RSV was the Roivant Foundation. Although Ramaswamy has centered his presidential campaign 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.
Vivek Ramaswamy co-founded Chapter Medicare in 2020, 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 early 2022, 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, J. D. Vance, and Bill Ackman.
Strive has positioned itself as an “anti-woke” and “anti-ESG” fund; Ramaswamy has criticized larger asset managers such as BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, alleging that their ESG activities mix business with politics and disadvantage shareholders. Pension-fund managers use ESG to evaluate long-term risk, including climate risks, in assessing portfolio and business decisions.
Ramaswamy has crusaded against ESG and emphasizes the doctrine of “shareholder primacy” first 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.
In January 2023, Strive launched a proxy advisory service to compete with such mainstream firms as Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services. As of June 2023, Strive’s total assets under management were approximately $750 million; net new deposits into Strive and two dozen other anti-ESG funds had slowed.
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.
Vivek Ramaswamy was Strive’s executive chairman before resigning in February 2023 to focus on his presidential campaign. Ramaswamy said that he voted for 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, he 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. From 2020 to 2023, he donated $30,000 to the Ohio Republican Party. In 2016, he donated $2,700 to the campaign of Dena Grayson, a Florida Democrat running for Congress. Before running for president, Ramaswamy considered running in the 2022 election for U.S. Senate in Ohio.
On February 21, 2023, he declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 2024 on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Ramaswamy publicly released 20 years of his individual income tax returns and called upon his rivals in the primary to do the same. His fortune has 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 Trump’s and Ron DeSantis’s, but ahead of most of the other Republican primary candidates’. 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 it was politically motivated. Forbes reported Ramaswamy may have paid an editor to alter his Wikipedia page to appear more favorable to political conservatives before announcing his campaign by removing references to his Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans postgraduate fellowship and his involvement with the Ohio COVID-19 Response Team.
Paul and Daisy Soros are respectively the elder brother and sister-in-law of businessman and social activist George Soros, who has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories among American conservatives. Ramaswamy’s campaign denied attempting to “scrub” his Wikipedia page and argued the edits were revisions of “factual distortions”. During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he sought to appeal to evangelical Christian right and Christian nationalist voters, an important part of the Republican base, some of whom were unwilling to support a non-Christian presidential candidate such as Ramaswamy (who is Hindu).
In campaign stops and interviews, Ramaswamy has criticized secularism. He said 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 has called himself an “unapologetic American nationalist”; he has often attacked DeSantis but has avoided directly criticizing Trump.
Political positions
Although they are running against each other for the 2024 Republican nomination, Ramaswamy is a vocal supporter of Donald Trump. After Trump’s social media accounts were suspended following the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld co-wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed that called the attack “disgraceful”, but argued that social media websites should be treated as state actors and that their ban of Trump violated the First Amendment.
Trump and Ramaswamy dined together at Trump’s club in New Jersey in 2022 and spoke with each other at an April 2023 National Rifle Association of America convention. Trump has praised Ramaswamy, writing on his social media website, “The thing I like about Vivek is that he only has good things to say about ‘President Trump.'” After Trump was indicted on federal criminal charges in 2023, Ramaswamy immediately rallied behind Trump. He gave a press conference outside the Miami courthouse where Trump was arraigned and promised to pardon him if elected president.
Vivek Ramaswamy has promised to pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, and has called Snowden’s actions “heroic”. He has also indicated an openness to pardon Hunter Biden, if convicted of crimes, “in the interest of moving the nation forward”. He suggested that if nominated, he might consider Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his running mate.
Ramaswamy argues that identity politics promotes a “victimhood” culture that should be replaced by a “merit” culture that promotes excellence. He also opposes affirmative action, calling it the “single biggest form of institutionalized racism in America today”, and vowing to rescind Executive Order 11246 if elected. Ramaswamy has also argued that American-style capitalism provides an antidote to India’s caste system by offering lower-caste citizens more economic opportunities.
He opposes teaching critical race theory. Ramaswamy describes himself as pro-life, and has said, “I think abortion is murder.” He supports state-level six-week abortion bans, with exceptions for rape, incest, and danger to the woman’s life, but opposes a federal ban. He supports expanding presidential power, pledging to rule by executive fiat to a degree unprecedented among modern U.S. presidents. He supports abolishing and replacing the Department of Education, FBI, and IRS.
He asserts that the president has the unilateral power to abolish these agencies by executive order, although under the Constitution, Congress has the power of the purse. He has pledged to fire “at least half the federal workforce” and dismantle federal civil service protections, turning federal jobs into at-will jobs. He called for an eight-year term for all government employees and pledged to revoke the executive order issued by President Kennedy that gave federal employees a right to collectively bargain.
Vivek Ramaswamy also has proposed repealing the federal law that requires presidents to spend all the money Congress appropriates. Ramaswamy favors raising the voting age to 25, with exceptions, through the creation of a new constitutional amendment that would supersede the 26th Amendment. He has said he would allow citizens between 18 and 24 to vote only if they are enlisted in the military, work as first responders, or pass a civics test identical to the one immigrants must pass to become naturalized U.S. citizens, arguing this will raise civic engagement, national pride, and turnout among young voters. Voters under 25 make up nearly 9% of the U.S. electorate.
Ramaswamy also supports making Election Day a federal holiday and requiring Voter ID to cast a ballot. Ramaswamy has pledged to “use our military to annihilate the Mexican drug cartels”. He has described himself as “not a war on drugs person”, and is in favor of federally legalizing marijuana. He has taken no public position on the 2017 Trump tax cuts. In his book Nation of Victims, he expressed support for an inheritance tax rate as high as 59% and criticized intergenerational transfers of wealth, writing that they create a “hereditary aristocracy”.
He has called for ending the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate (to control inflation and minimize unemployment), saying that the Fed’s mission should be limited to controlling inflation. Ramaswamy favors “major concessions to Russia” in the Russo-Ukrainian war. He favors ending U.S. military aid to Ukraine, excluding Ukraine from NATO (saying he is “dead-set opposed” to it), and allowing Russia to occupy regions of Ukraine in exchange for an agreement that Russia end its alliance with China.
Vivek Ramaswamy called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “bully” and in a 2023 interview made unsupported claims that Jews and other minorities have been poorly treated in Ukraine under Zelensky (who is himself Jewish). Ramaswamy was a supporter of Taiwanese independence but now says China could invade Taiwan without major consequences from the U.S. and has floated the idea of “putting a gun in every Taiwanese household” to deter an invasion by China.
He argues that it is vital for the U.S. to give Taiwan military protection until at least 2028, due to its manufacture of semiconductors, until the U.S. can transition towards “semiconductor independence”. Ramaswamy has said that he is “not a climate denier” but sees global climate change as “not entirely bad” and has said that “people should be proud to live a high-carbon lifestyle.” Ramaswamy accepts that burning fossil fuels causes climate change, but has called for the U.S. to “drill, frack, burn coal” and asserted that extracting and using more fossil fuels would grow the economy and help pay for climate change mitigation.
He has 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”. In 2022, he urged Chevron to increase oil production and criticized its support for a carbon tax. Ramaswamy’s company holds a 0.02% stake in Chevron. He opposes subsidies for electric vehicles.
Wife
Vivek Ramaswamy is a married man and has children with his wife. His wife Apoorva Ramaswamy (née Tewari) is a physician. The couple first met while studying law at Yale, where his wife was studying medicine. Ramaswamy is a Hindu and has stressed his belief in one God. According to relatives, he is fluent in Tamil, his mother tongue and understands (but does not speak) Malayalam, his parent’s home state language. He is a vegetarian. He lived in New York City 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.
Vivek Ramaswamy net worth
How much is Vivek Ramaswamy worth? Vivek Ramaswamy net worth is estimated at around $1.5 billion. His main source of income is from his primary work as an entrepreneur. Vivek Ramaswamy’s salary per month and other career earnings are over $50 million dollars annually. His remarkable achievements have earned him some luxurious lifestyles and some fancy car trips. He is one of the richest and most influential entrepreneurs in the United States. He stands at an appealing height of 1.75m and has a good body weight which suits his personality.