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Vivek Ramaswamy has risen to the ranks of the 2nd Republican Candidate for President BEHIND Donald Trump. So who is this guy? He was born in.....

Background

The investor and former pharmaceutical company CEO is running an outsider campaign based largely on a critique of “wokeness” among corporations and other institutions.

A relentless earned-media campaign has vaulted Ramaswamy up the standings. Actually winning the nomination is another story, but thus far Ramaswamy has done what it takes to get a 38-year-old, first-time candidate into contention.

Early life

Ramaswamy was born on August 9, 1985, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Indian Hindu immigrant parents. His family are Tamil-speaking Brahmins 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. His parents immigrated from Palakkad district in Kerala, where the family had an ancestral home in a traditional agraharam in the town of Vadakkencherry.

Ramaswamy was raised in Ohio. Growing up, Ramaswamy often attended the local Hindu temple in Dayton 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.

Education

Ramaswamy attended public schools through eighth grade. He then attended Cincinnati's St. Xavier High School, a Catholic school affiliated with the Jesuit order, graduating valedictorian in 2003.

In 2007, Ramaswamy graduated from Harvard University 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. He 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.

In 2011, Ramaswamy was awarded a post-graduate fellowship by the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which he used to attend Yale Law School. At Yale he befriended future U.S. Senator J. D. Vance. He earned a Juris Doctor in 2013. In a 2023 interview, Ramaswamy said that he was a member of the campus Jewish intellectual discussion society Shabtai while a law student. By the time he attended Yale, 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.

Early career

In 2007, Ramaswamy and Travis May co-founded Campus Venture Network, 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, Concert Pharmaceuticals, Pharmasset, and Martin Shkreli's Retrophin. In a 2023 speech and in his book Woke Inc., Ramaswamy called Shkreli both "brilliant" and a pathological liar, but criticized the U.S. Department of Justice for prosecuting him, calling Shkreli's fraud a victimless crime.

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, focused on the Asian market.