Vivek Ramaswami She’s just 37, but she sent political pundits rushing to see her resume after declaring her long-rumored candidacy on Fox News’ top-rated news show hosted by Tucker Carlson. In a separate article in the Wall Street Journal, whose offering of a platform showed how seriously he is being taken, Ramaswamy stated that “he is launching not only a political campaign but also a cultural movement to create a new American dream, which is not only about money but about the unrepentant pursuit of excellence.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Ramaswamy is a first generation Indian-American whose parents immigrated from Palakkad, Kerala and embraced the American Dream. His father, Ganapathy Ramaswamy, an engineer, worked for General Electric, and his mother, Geetha, was a geriatric psychiatrist in Cincinnati. His brother, Shankar Ramaswamy, is also a biotechnologist and co-founder and CEO of Kriya Therapeutics, a biotechnology company and his wife, Apoorva Tewari, is an assistant professor and surgeon at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
Vivek Ramaswamy himself has had a spectacular academic career, graduating from Harvard College with a degree in biology and receiving a law degree from Yale in 2013, during which time he was also a partner in a holding company that managed its biotech portfolio. His personal fortune, said to be around $500 million, was built largely around Roivant Sciences, a pharmaceutical company he founded in 2014.
In 2021, he stepped down as CEO of Roivant to begin a political journey through first publishing Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, followed by Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit and the Path Back to Excellence, published in September 2022. Both books are now being examined to evaluate his decidedly centre-right political philosophy.
In a New York profile, media appearances, and his own writings, he railed against the work and death of merit in America, pledging to eliminate affirmative action – America’s equivalent of reservation – and to repeal civil service protection for federal employees.
“We’ve been celebrating our diversity and our differences for so long, that we’ve forgotten all the ways we’re truly equal to Americans, bound by a common set of ideals that set this nation in motion 250 years ago,” he said Tucker Carlson, arguing “Those ground rules of the road: meritocracy, the idea that you get by in this country, not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character.”
In other interviews, he has argued that American capitalism is vastly superior to the Indian caste system due to the economic opportunities it offers to the underprivileged.
Ramaswamy jumps into a Republican field expected to be crowded with former President Donald Trump leading the field in which another Indian-American, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, also appears. But Ramaswamy has the advantage – or the disadvantage – of being a relatively unknown political entity, although his media prowess is garnering him a lot of coverage.
“A young, wealthy, little-known tech entrepreneur who calls ‘wokeism’ a national threat announced Tuesday night that he’s seeking the Republican presidential nomination,” began a story in The Washington Post, amid several major media outlets that noted his offer.
