Background and career
Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy (born August 9, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and politician. He founded Roivant Sciences, a biotechnological pharmaceutical company, in 2014 and was its chief executive officer until 2021. Ramaswamy was a candidate in the 2024 Republican primaries, but withdrew his bid and endorsed Donald Trump. He is the Republican nominee in the 2026 Ohio gubernatorial election. Ramaswamy was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Indian immigrant parents. He earned a bachelor's degree in biology from Harvard College in 2007 and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 2013. He worked at a hedge fund before founding Roivant Sciences and co-founded an investment firm, Strive Asset Management, in 2022. Forbes estimated Ramaswamy's net worth to be $2.3 billion in September 2026, derived primarily from his biotech and financial businesses. Ramaswamy described himself as apolitical until 2020, when he supported Trump in the 2020 presidential election. In 2021, Ramaswamy wrote his first book, Woke Inc, and appeared on cable networks arguing against left-wing and "woke" policies. From 2020 to 2023, he donated $30,000 to the Ohio Republican Party.
Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on August 9, 1985 to parents from India. His father, Vadakanchery Ganapathy Ramaswamy, a graduate of the National Institute of Technology Calicut, worked as an engineer for General Electric, and his mother, Geetha Ramaswamy, a graduate of the Mysore Medical College & Research Institute, worked as a geriatric psychiatrist for Merck and Schering-Plough. His parents are from the Palakkad district in Kerala, where their Palakkad Iyer family had an ancestral Agraharam home. Ramaswamy was raised in Ohio. Growing up, Ramaswamy often attended a 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. He played tennis in his youth, and was ranked No. 48 in the Midwest in the under-16 boys' regional rankings in 2001 by the United States Tennis Association.
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. Ramaswamy received a Bachelor of Arts (summa cum laude) in biology from Harvard University in 2007. He 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 Amaranth Advisors, a hedge fund, and investment bank Goldman Sachs. He wrote his senior thesis on the ethical questions raised by creating human-animal chimeras, earning him a Bowdoin Prize. In 2011, Ramaswamy was a recipient of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. Ramaswamy later said that by the time he attended Yale Law School, he was already wealthy from his activities 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. At Yale Law School, he befriended future vice president of the United States JD Vance. He received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School 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.
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.
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 market. The company created numerous subsidiaries, including Dermavant (focused on dermatology), Urovant (focused on urological disease), and China-based Sinovant and Cytovant, both focused on the Asian market. In 2015, Ramaswamy raised $360 million for the Roivant subsidiary Axovant Sciences in an attempt to market intepirdine as a drug for Alzheimer's disease. In December 2014, Axovant purchased the patent for intepirdine from GlaxoSmithKline (where the drug had failed four previous clinical trials) for $5 million, a small sum in the industry. Ramaswamy appeared on the cover of Forbes in 2015, and said his company would "be the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry." Before new clinical trials began, he engineered Axovant's initial public offering (IPO); it became a "Wall Street darling" and raised $315 million. The company's market value initially soared to almost $3 billion, although at the time it only had eight employees, including Ramaswamy's brother and mother. Ramaswamy took a massive payout after selling a portion of his shares in Roivant to Viking Global Investors. He claimed more than $37 million in capital gains in 2015. Ramaswamy said his company would be the "Berkshire Hathaway of drug development" and touted the drug as a "tremendous" opportunity that "could help millions" of patients, prompting some criticism that he was overpromising. In September 2017, the company announced that intepirdine had failed in its large clinical trial. The company's value plunged; it lost 75% in one day and continued to decline afterward. Shareholders who lost money included various institutional investors, such as the pension fund of the California State Teachers' Retirement System. Ramaswamy was insulated from much of Axovant's losses because he held his stake through Roivant. The company abandoned intepirdine. In 2018, Ramaswamy said he had no regrets about how the company handled the drug. In subsequent years, he said he regretted the outcome but was annoyed by criticism of the company. Axovant thereafter attempted to reinvent itself as a gene therapy company, and dissolved in 2023. In 2017, Roivant partnered with CITIC Private Equity of the Chinese state-owned CITIC Group to form Sinovant. In 2017, Ramaswamy struck a deal with Masayoshi Son in which SoftBank invested $1.1 billion in Roivant. In 2019, Roivant sold its stake in five subsidiaries (or "vants"), including Enzyvant, to Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma; Ramaswamy made $175 million in capital gains from the sale. The deal also gave Sumitomo Dainippon a 10% stake in Roivant. While campaigning for the presidency, Ramaswamy called himself a "scientist" and said, "I developed a number of medicines." In January 2021, Ramaswamy stepped down as CEO of Roivant Sciences and assumed the role of executive chairman. In 2021, after he resigned as CEO, Roivant was listed on the Nasdaq via a reverse merger with Montes Archimedes Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition vehicle. In February 2023, Ramaswamy stepped down as chair of Roivant to focus on his presidential campaign. Ramaswamy remains the sixth-largest shareholder of Roivant, retaining a 7.17% stake. During Ramaswamy's time running Roivant the company had never been profitable.
In 2020, when Ramaswamy was CEO of Roivant Sciences, the company established a nonprofit social-impact arm, Roivant Social Ventures (RSV), with his support. An earlier iteration of RSV, the Roivant Foundation, was created in 2018. Although Ramaswamy's presidential campaign centered on opposing corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) initiatives, RSV worked in support of pro-DEI and ESG initiatives, including promoting health equity and diversity within the biopharma and biotech industries. While campaigning, Ramaswamy has downplayed his role in creating and overseeing RSV.
