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Donald Trump just appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as co-heads of a new Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE. Here’s how Trump’s former rival Ramaswamy built his fortune.
By means of John HyattForbes staff
UPDATE, November 13, 2024: On November 12, a week after Donald Trump won the presidential election, he appointed billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as co-heads of a new entity, the Department of Government Efficiency. Already nicknamed DOGE, it is charged with cutting wasteful spending, reducing excessive regulation and restructuring federal agencies.
“This is truly a once-in-a-century opportunity. We will be radically transparent about the government waste we expose,” Ramaswamy said posted on X on Thursday, November 13. Here’s the inside story – first published by Forbes in August 2023 – on how Ramaswamy, the lesser-known and less wealthy Musk counterpart, made his own billion-dollar fortune.
SStanding in a crowded restaurant in New Hampshire, Vivek Ramaswamy, the fresh-faced Republican shaking up the 2024 presidential race, makes the case for uniting a bitterly divided nation. The secret, he emphasizes, is as American as apple pie: capitalism.
“Both Democrats and Republicans are often more proud of a country if we all make more money in that country,” he tells about a hundred guests enjoying turkey sandwiches and Diet Coke. “We don’t have to flog ourselves for capitalism. Stop apologizing for capitalism. We must embrace capitalism.”
Ramaswamy certainly did that. At 38 years old, the biotech investor and “anti-woke” fighter is worth more than $950 million. His net worth topped $1 billion about a week ago, making him one of the country’s 20 youngest billionaires, before a market downturn pulled him just below the billion-dollar threshold, according to Forbes’ calculations. Yet he appears to be the second-richest person entering the Republican presidential primaries, behind only Donald Trump (whose net worth Forbes last set at $2.5 billion).
Ramaswamy’s fortune stems from a drug development company called Roivant Sciences, which went public in 2021. Shares are up nearly 40% this year, boosting the value of Ramaswamy’s 10% stake to about $600 million. Since founding the company nine years ago, he has sucked more than $260 million out of Roivant in the form of salary, bonuses and capital gains. He diversified those returns into a fairly standard investment portfolio, about 60% stocks and 40% bonds. But he also added some flavor, with a dash of Bitcoin and Ethereum, some shares of YouTube competitor Rumble and a stake in crypto payments company MoonPay.
Then there are his political interests. In 2021, Ramaswamy stepped down as CEO of Roivant and entered politics, authoring a book titled “Woke, Inc.,” which criticized corporate America’s growing focus on social justice issues justice and on the ESG (environment, social and governance) movement that Wall is taking over. Street. A year later, he founded a provider of “anti-woke” index funds – think BlackRock, without all the talk about saving the world – called Strive Asset Management. Investors recently valued Strive at around $300 million, according to two people familiar with the financing, implying Ramaswamy’s stake is worth well over $100 million.
It’s a lot of money to make in a short time. The son of Indian immigrants — Ramaswamy’s father an engineer and patent attorney, his mother a psychiatrist — he attended Harvard, where he studied biology and co-founded StudentBusinesses.com, a website for student founders to pitch professional investors. A private charity reportedly bought the company in 2009 for an undisclosed amount.
After graduating, Ramaswamy joined the hedge fund QVT, where he specialized in pharmaceutical investments. He earned $7 million in the first seven years of his career and became a partner when he was 28. Around the same time, he met his current wife, Apoorva, a throat surgeon. While he continued to work, he also managed to earn a degree from America’s most prestigious law school, Yale.
Ramaswamy left his job at QVT at the age of 29 and, with backing from the hedge fund, founded an investment holding company called Roivant Sciences. His thesis: Pharma giants had enough abandoned drugs that could be worth a fortune if someone focused on them. A year after the company’s founding, one of Roivant’s spinoffs, called Axovant, went public at a valuation of $2.2 billion. Its prized asset: a much-hyped Alzheimer’s drug candidate, Intepirdine, which Ramaswamy bought for just $5 million. The year Axovant joined the New York Stock Exchange, Ramaswamy reported more than $38 million in income on his tax returns, most of it from capital gains.
Intepirdine proved a disappointment, failing in a clinical trial two years later. The company was renamed Sio Gene Therapies in 2020 and is now worth about $30 million. But Ramaswamy also had other medicines. In 2020, Japanese pharma giant Sumitomo Dainippon paid $3 billion to acquire five, as well as a 10% stake in Roivant. Ramaswamy received his second major windfall that year, reporting $176 million in income on his tax returns, including $174.5 million in capital gains.
Awash in cash, Ramaswamy stepped away from his company in January 2021, citing his “increasing public involvement” in a note to shareholders. He published his book seven months later and founded the ‘anti-woke’ asset management company Strive around the same time. “We stand for this movement that we call ‘excellence capitalism’ as a counterpoint to stakeholder capitalism,” Ramaswamy explained at the Trillions podcast. “What excellence capitalism says is that you should focus solely on providing excellent products and services to your customers, above all other agendas, including political and social agendas. And that is different from stakeholder capitalism, which says that you have to take twelve to twenty stakeholders into account at the same time.”
A series of serious investors funded Strive. Megadonor Peter Thiel, who backed other “anti-woke” ventures like Rumble, put some money into it. So did hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who has invested heavily in the pharmaceutical industry and hooked up with Ramaswamy while playing tennis. Joe Lonsdale, the 40-year-old co-founder of Palantir, also contributed.
For all his money and connections, Ramaswamy seems quite comfortable with meet-and-greet politics in New Hampshire. It helps, he says, that he doesn’t live like a tycoon. “I don’t think we’ve lived a lifestyle that’s radically removed from the lifestyle we grew up in.” He owns two homes in Ohio worth a combined $2.5 million, less than the real estate portfolios of many less wealthy candidates, including Nikki Haley, Francis Suarez, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Joe Biden. “We don’t have huge holiday homes,” says Ramaswamy. “We see five of our neighbors’ backyards. We have good relations with our neighbors.”
The exception, he admits, concerns private air travel. He owns shares in three private jets, which allow him to hop around the country and still return home to spend time with his wife and two young children in Ohio. “If we could buy time, we would buy time,” he says. “And that’s the only thing that private aviation buys us. Time with family.”
Voters seem to recognize that Ramaswamy lives in a different stratosphere. In Milford, an elderly woman thanked him for visiting “us cow town people” in New Hampshire. “Oh come on,” the billionaire presidential candidate responded, looking a little embarrassed. “I’m one of you.”
Of course he isn’t. That is part of the appeal.
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