Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy is an American entrepreneur and presidential candidate. He founded Roivant Sciences, a pharmaceutical company, in 2014. In February 2023, Ramaswamy declared his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination in the 2024 United States presidential election.

Ramaswamy was born in Cincinnati to Indian immigrant parents. He graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in biology and later earned a J.D. from Yale Law School. Ramaswamy worked as an investment partner at a hedge fund before founding Roivant Sciences. He also co-founded an investment firm, Strive Asset Management.

Early life and education

Vivek Ganapathy 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.

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 as 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.

Career

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 to the nonprofit Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in 2009.

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, whose company had greatly increased the cost of a life-saving drug, both "brilliant" and a pathological liar. He criticized the U.S. Department of Justice for prosecuting Shkreli, calling his fraud a victimless crime.

Other ventures

In 2020, Ramaswamy co-founded Chapter Medicare, 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.

Presidential campaign (2023–present)

Early political involvement

• 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, Ramaswamy 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. In 2016, he donated $2,700 to the campaign of Dena Grayson, a Florida Democrat running for Congress. From 2020 to 2023, he donated $30,000 to the Ohio Republican Party.
• Ramaswamy considered running in the 2022 U.S. Senate election in Ohio.

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 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'.

Personal life

Ramaswamy's wife, Apoorva Ramaswamy (née Tewari), is a medical doctor; he met her while studying law at Yale, where she was studying medicine. They married in 2015 and have two sons. Ramaswamy has a younger brother, Shankar, who worked for him at Axovant and later co-founded Kriya Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company.

Ramaswamy is a monotheistic Hindu. According to relatives, he is fluent in Tamil and understands (but does not speak) Malayalam. He is a vegetarian. In 2020 Ramaswamy called himself an animal rights activist, writing that it is "wrong to kill sentient animals for culinary pleasure."

In 2023, Ramaswamy's campaign advisor said his net worth was more than $1 billion; Forbes estimated it at more than $950 million. He lived in Manhattan 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. A 2023 Politico profile of Ramaswamy mentions him living in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.