GOP interloper Vivek Ramaswamy, who turned headlines, has received a lot of attention for his performance in Wednesday night’s Republican primary debate, clashing with his rivals and sending a speech to conservatives. Pai Jipan throws red meat, and has repeatedly positioned himself as a business tycoon who can turn losses into profits within the party. .
Ramaswamy’s exact net worth is difficult to determine. Forbes Market conditions estimate the figure to be just under a billion dollars.
Ramaswamy, 38, has no public service experience and little evidence of political ideology ahead of 2020, one of only two presidential elections he has contested. He is counting on voters to assess his commander-in-chief potential by scrutinizing his business record. In this regard, even critics acknowledge Ramaswamy’s financial success. Forbes Based on market conditions, his net worth is estimated to be just under a billion dollars. But Ramaswamy also often exaggerates his corporate achievements and obfuscates how they were achieved.
He started his career as a hedge fund manager earning millions, but not enough to make him a millionaire. He then went on his own to start a biotech company that he said had a new strategy for finding drugs to develop.
It is claimed that Ramaswamy Expansive His own success and fortune came while public speaking. As they say, he pitched investors and the public on the idea that his biotech companies were developing promising drugs, then cashed out whether or not they actually did, according to arrive New York Times. “Everything about him is a hoax,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a prominent professor at the Yale School of Management and a regular critic of Ramaswamy, told us wealth. “It’s a card game. He creates illusions and makes himself something he’s not, so it’s basically a diversion and distraction game.”
Ramaswamy’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Critics have described Ramaswamy as yet another example of a wealthy man looking to add national attention to his list of achievements.Since entering the Republican race in February, his poll numbers have risen to 11%According to a Fox News poll of Republican primary voters earlier this month. But rival Republican candidates appeared less interested in his outsider status or his business experience, which they attacked on Wednesday as irrelevant to the presidency.
“We don’t need to bring in a rookie,” former Vice President Mike Pence said in a heated exchange about the nation’s rising debt during the debate, ignoring his commitment to serving under another president, Donald Trump. Facts, while the latter has no previous political experience. experience.
Ravamaswamy’s business experience demonstrates his desire to shake up entrenched industries, often opposing incumbents by challenging or even mocking their insistence on the status quo. After graduating from Harvard University with an undergraduate biology degree in 2007, Ramaswamy started his career at the hedge fund QVT, becoming a partner at the age of 28.There, he put his biology degree into practice, carving out a space for himself: the impossible but ultimately profitable source of choice biotech deals.
In 2014, he founded Roivant, a company that promised to revolutionize drug discovery and deliver “the highest return on investment the pharmaceutical industry has ever seen.” explain In a 2015 interview. (His former boss and QVT founder Dan Gold is now on Roivant’s board.)
Roivant’s strategy is to cheaply buy the rights to potential drugs put on hold by big pharma companies like Pfizer, Merck and GSK for various reasons, and push them all the way through clinical trials to the market. To get a cheap initial price, the company promised major pharmaceutical companies a cut of future profits.
The strategy has raised concerns among some.
Pierre Azoulay, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, told the health publication: “I know I might look like a fool in two or three years, but it sounds like some people are being fooled. gone.” Statistical data In a 2016 article about the founding of Roivant. At the time, the biotech industry was in the midst of a wave of huge investments, some of which went to hyped companies whose research ultimately failed to yield any viable drugs.
The early failure first brought Ramaswamy to the media’s attention. In 2014, Roivant paid just $5 million up front for an Alzheimer’s drug that GSK dropped.Roviant then turned the potential drug into a start-up, Axovant, through which $2.2 billion IPO 2015 – A record sum for a biotech company at the time.According to statistics, Ramaswamy made at least $38 million in the year of Axovant’s IPO Forbes.Yet two years later, the company’s only drug clinical trial failure Its stock plummeted. As of last March, Ramaswamy had reduced his stake in Axovant (later renamed Sio Gene Therapies) from 78% to 25%. Shares of Axovant are currently trading at 39 cents.
“He was a very rich man,” Sonnenfeld said. “The problem is that it’s basically built from a version that pulls and dumps.”
Royvant closed some big deals during Ravamaswamy’s tenure. Most notably, in 2019 it struck a $3 billion deal with Japanese drugmaker Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma, buying five drugs Roivant was developing in addition to its 11% stake in the company. As of May, Ramaswamy retained a 7% stake in Roviant, which now has a market capitalization of $8.7 billion, making Ramaswamy’s stake worth about $609 million.
Sonnenfeld pointed out that Ramaswamy’s representatives called him a billionaire, but Ramaswamy didn’t call himself that.
Whatever Ramaswamy’s exact net worth, it’s clear that Ramaswamy has enough to spend at least $10 million on his campaign. Fox News said in a May interview that he would spend “no limit” on the campaign report.
Ramaswamy left Royvant in early 2021 because of his “increasing public engagement”, which included multiple wall street journal column and a book, walker co., to criticize corporate social responsibility practices. He turned that disdain into another business idea, launching an “anti-awakening” fund, Strive Asset Management. Strive’s flagship ETF, Strive US Energy, has 25% fewer assets under management than at the start of the year. “It’s a disastrous investment idea,” Sonnenfeld said.
Presumably, Ramaswamy’s disdain for ESG and “woke businesses” was intended to lay the groundwork for his eventual presidential bid. But Sonnenfeld sees parallels between Strive Asset Management, Ramaswamy’s work in biotech and his bid for the Republican nomination: “He’s catching up with fashion.”
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