In what may be the first of a series of brief biographies and commentaries on the various people that would like to become the next President of the United States, it's worth starting with Vivek Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy is only attracting about seven percent support rate among Republicans as of August 21, 2023 so clearly there's room for the discriminating Republican primary voter to learn more about him. The short synopsis is he's a mix of the most defining characteristics of Donald Trump and Ron Desantis.
And that is not a good thing, for Republicans or America in general.
Ramaswamy is making news as of late for doing what any political candidate failing to break a five percent support rate is desperate to do... Get in the news -- by saying anything. ANYTHING. In particular, an article in The Atlantic entitled VIVEK RAMASWAMY’S TRUTH included this quote about September 11, 2001:
I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero. But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to.
He's not raising questions about whether America might have been MORE aware of the threat than we thought and had positioned air marshals on the flights who failed to act then squelched THAT news in embarrassment. He's re-raising the far right lunatic fringe theory that the terrorist attacks were the result of American plots hatched within the government. With the leader of the Republican candidates dominating the field in both voter support and indictments by wide margins, apparently Ramaswamy thinks the "9/11 inside job" conspiracy fringe is under-exploited by the other candidates and provides an opening for him to pass seven percent.
In another desperate appearance on Fox News on August 18, 2023 covered by The Hill, Ramaswamy tried to provide a sound byte explaining his modus operandi for improving the efficiency of government.
What [Musk] did at Twitter is a good example of what I want to do to the administrative state. Take out the 75 percent of the dead weight cost, improve the actual experience of what it’s supposed to do.
So who is the demographic seeking out a candidate spouting this type of sound byte? The same demographic that
- complain about long waits for passports
- complain about long waits to get a tax question answered by the IRS
- complain about constant airport delays amid controller staffing shortages
- wonder where the fresh water and food are at after their home gets destroyed in a flood
- expect a bailout when their home or business is destroyed for the third time by a hurricane or flood
- don't understand the insanity of overpaying for a company then laying off half the workforce
Vivek Ramaswamy graduated from Harvard as an undergrad in 2007. He earned a law degree from Yale in 2013 but between 2007 and 2013 he developed a net worth of over $15 million dollars working at hedge fund QVT Financial. Hmmmm. He stayed employed at a hedge fund while going to law school at Yale?
One of his biggest business efforts involves a firm called Roivant which operates multiple subsidiaries (all with names of the form ____vant) focused on drug development in different areas. One was Axovant Sciences, which was trying to develop a drug for Alzheimer's. The firm purchased the patent for the drug they were going to develop and test from GlaxoSmithKline for $5 million dollars in 2014. In 2015, the firm raised $360 million from venture capitalists. He took Axovant public later in 2015, raising an additional $315 million dollars in the IPO, a share price that implied a total market valuation of over $3 billion. Ramaswamy immediately cashed out $37 million dollars that same year. By 2017, the company announced the drug had failed its first clinical trials and the stock plummeted in value by 75% and continued dropping to $0.13/share in 2020, at which point the firm changed its name to Sio Gene Therapies and ticker symbol SIOX which is still only trading at $0.38/share.
In 2017, SoftBank invested over $1.1 BILLION dollars in the parent firm Roivant and within 2 years, Roivant sold off the different subsidiaries to another firm, netting Ramaswamy another $175 million. Keep in mind SoftBank has not been noted for making many smart investments. Softbank also invested $10 billion into WeWork, a firm that recently announced a 40:1 reverse stock split in order to get its stock price up from the current $0.13 (yes, 13 CENTS) that would trigger a de-listing from the NYSE.
How is that parent company Roivant doing since selling off its first litter of startup subsidiaries? As part of a prearranged deal, Roivant merged with a special purpose acquisition company ("SPAC") to go public on December 6, 2020 (NASDAQ symbol ROIV) with an initial share price of $10.50. Roivant currently trades at $10.87, up nearly one dollar from its $9.92 IPO price and down from its peak of $11.96 on 12/19/2021. Ramaswamy still owns a 7% share in the parent entity Roivant which continues forming new "seed" companies aimed at specific diseases or merging with other companies. Despite all of these deals, Roivant has never been profitable.
He is also currently being sued by two former employees of his firm Strive Asset Management who claim he and his co-founder fired them because they raised sexual harassment claims about an executive at the firm and they were pressured into using sales materials that promised specific future returns and allowed unregistered employees to sell securities -- both securities violations.
While his undergraduate work at Harvard involved biology, it appears his career to date has involved neither providing scientific insight / guidance to these pharmaceutical startups nor providing ongoing daily operations guidance to these pharmaceutical startups. Instead, his college internship gig and later employment at a hedge fund seem to indicate he has focused on exploiting the unique aspects of drug R&D that involve a) astronomical financial investments, b) very high payoffs for winners, c) phenomenally low success rates. These dynamics create an environment where hope springs eternal for the next wonder drug and large amounts of money have to be raised to buy a ticket in a scientific lottery. He seems to excel at being in the room where millions of dollars are transferred as these lotto tickets are being purchased, having ownership for a brief period then cashing out before the downside of the risk drops evaluations or actual failed results bring the venture crashing to the ground.
It is possible that playing such a role provides a valuable service within big pharma by helping to eliminate the friction that slows the flow of money into legitimate efforts to develop drugs that could be highly beneficial and/or profitable. It is also possible he is purely interested in exacting a toll from the process while taking none of the risks and is thus a net drain on an already cumbersome scientific and financial processes. It is absolutely clear from the business model he is leveraging that he has ZERO expertise at actually improving the long-term operations and efficiency of a needed organization. More than likely, he's a successful GAMBLER trading on his own account but he is not a BUILDER of anything.
The constant "deal making" involved with the Roivant business model also sounds disturbingly similar to Worldcom in the 1990s -- constantly merging and acquiring to generate buzz about the next big thing while distracting investors from the fact that the business model doesn't appear to be working or terribly efficient. So maybe Ramaswamy does know something about laying off employees. All of his wealth seems to have stemmed from cashing out early enough in hype cycles that he created.
So let's summarize...
Sounds like a 90/10 mix of Trump and DeSantis.
WTH
