Posted on 09/02/2023 8:10:34 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd
~snip~
Let's start with the basics. Ramaswamy has funded his campaign through the sale of over $32 million in Roivant stock options in February of this year. This could lead one to believe that Roivant, based in Bermuda, is thriving and that Ramaswamy is a great entrepreneur. Except the company reported staggering losses of $1.2 billion in its financial report of March 2023. This isn't a one-time slump: In March 2022, when Ramaswamy was still Roivant's chairman and a major shareholder, the company reported an annual loss of $924.1 million.
~snip~
The reality is that Roivant's finances were abysmal under Ramaswamy's watch. During his tenure in 2019, the company's net operating loss exceeded $530 million. By 2020, the losses had doubled to over $1 billion, accompanied by a 65 percent decline in revenue.
These numbers raise a puzzling question: How can a company consistently bleeding billions trade at over $10 a share?
~snip~
While Ramaswamy vocally opposes ESG principles, Roivant's major institutional investors—including Morgan Stanley, Viking Global, and BlackRock, the very firms he criticizes by name—are among its largest stakeholders, owning over 500 million shares. Ramaswamy himself holds more than 80 million shares, making him an essential partner of these major ESG funds.
In a deeply ironic twist, Ramaswamy's anti-"woke" campaign is being bankrolled by the profits reaped from the very policies he denounces.
~snip~
Ramaswamy's latest scam appears to be his run for president. The 38-year-old presidential candidate appears to have no serious interest in leading the nation. In fact, according to people who know Ramaswamy, the goal of his campaign seems to be to block Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' path to the nomination by running as a MAGA-adjacent candidate.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
What you are “observing” is campaign season hot air. It means nothing.
That’s fair.
The attacks on him by leftists aren’t hot air. He’s genuinely hated by them.
It needs to be said, with a national bullhorn. I am fine with it, while the remaining get us into a war with Ukraine.
That barely qualifies as basis for suspicion. Are there any publicly reported instances of that sort of thing being done? And if so, how did the participants expect to escape scrutiny if large sums were involved?
Anyone connected with that 🐍 is a no, no.
Vivek is deep in it. One of his companies I believe was set up in China, which means in partnership with the CCP.
The Deep State did the early venture capital on many Big Tech companies to control them.
It is called “vulture capitalism” for a reason.
For those interested in something more than soundbites and slander, you might check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Obr5HIKK4Y
it's a 2-hour interview with Vivek Ramaswamy by Shawn Ryan.
Lots of interesting questions and responses here. Ryan actually lets Vivek talk without interrupting him.
Federal agency funds were openly invested in a handful of start-ups and publicly disclosed when that was done. Federal government involvement was purposely limited to that of being an investor.
He’s a complete and total fraud.. I Hope to God Trump gets better advice regarding this guy than he did with OZ…
Stay away from this con man…
It wasn’t a new biotech company. Vivek created a company to market a failed drug that he had purchased from Glaxo. Oddly enough the drug still didn’t work even after he sold millions of dollars of stock to investors who were led to believe that it would. I guess they didn’t read the fine print in the prospectus.
Vivek R.’s company, Roivant, was founded to pursue longshot strategies. In essence, drugs and drug class candidates that have progressed through late stage clinical trials can fail as to their intended disease target but may then be successfully revised or repurposed. Roivant and its subsidiaries are pursuing that strategy, hoping for one or two big successes that offset years of losses. It is a chancy business strategy but is not a fraud.
Axovant is the company Vivek founded to market Intepirdine, a drug that Glaxo developed and shelved after it failed four Stage IIB trials.
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/why-axovant-s-315m-ipo-bonanza-should-scare-hell-out-of-you
Why Axovant’s $315M IPO bonanza should scare the hell out of you
By John Carroll Jun 11, 2015 10:41am
Vivek Ramaswamy may not know anything about biotech and even less about treating Alzheimer’s, but he just provided a master class on the current state of public investing and executing IPOs in the field.
The bare bones of Ramaswamy’s new biotech venture, Axovant ($AXON), are much discussed these days. The former hedge fund manager grabbed an abandoned GlaxoSmithKline drug for Alzheimer’s for $5 million. He gathered a team together and without recruiting a single patient for a pivotal study of a marginal drug designed to treat symptoms of the disease, just raised $315 million in an upsized IPO that came in at the top of the range and promptly gyrated much higher today as investors bought in.
Axovant, with no track record, no experience and one questionable product, leaped onto the market worth much more than $1 billion.
Given the fact that GlaxoSmithKline had a chance to take a look at this drug in the clinic, and concluded that they couldn’t do better than selling it for lunch money, the IPO terms illustrate the kind of overnight riches a select few can find on Wall Street, provided you have the right kind of friends with money.
As Adam Feuerstein noted in a recent piece, two other hedge funds, RA Capital and Visium Asset Management, signaled an interest in buying up a bunch of these shares and were given a 90-day window to sell their shares, half the standard lock-up time.
None of this would be possible, of course, without the help of investors transfixed by the heady increase in the share prices of biotechs over the course of this bull market.
The fact that someone can make something of this size out of virtually nothing should be of concern to everyone in the industry. Magical thinking will take you just so far (remember the intoxicating dot-com days?). The argument that the market for biotech can stay stable rests on the belief that many of these new technologies in the clinic offer a fundamentally new and better way to treat many diseases. Something real. But when biotech mania takes over and perfectly legal schemes like this rain money, the pitfalls start to look like the Grand Canyon.
On a final note, we’re wrapping up our survey on biotech valuations and clinical trial execution. What a great day to provide us with your thoughts. You can complete the survey here. — John Carroll (email | Twitter)
Axovant, a subsidiary of Roivant, changed its name to Sio Gene Therapies and is now defunct. A failed venture is not in itself a fraud.
But you also have to look at the source of this faux outrage. The author, Sam Nunberg, has had a remarkably stormy history with Trump, who seems to have cornered the market on dramatic personnel changes. If you'll recall, he was an early member of Trump's election team, but wound up getting fired several times and ultimately endorsed Ted Cruz, saying that Trump, IIRC, "lacked the temperment to be President".
Now he's in Newsweek, and finally gives his game away at the end of the piece: "
"In fact, according to people who know Ramaswamy, the goal of his campaign seems to be to block Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' path to the nomination by running as a MAGA-adjacent candidate.
...
Serving as Donald Trump's political fullback and hiding unflattering information from voters may not be a crime, but it is part of a disturbing pattern with Ramaswamy, which goes something like this: Generate media buzz, pull out right before the crash, and leave a rubble behind for others to clean up. In this case, the ones who will have to clean up his mess are Republican primary voters."
None of which exonerates Ramaswamy, but this reads like more of the (increasingly insufferable) DeSantis cheer squad taking potshots at Trump than a genuine critique of Ramaswamy.
The way this piece and similar dross looks to me is that the GOPe has gone beyond anger, and has entered a state of despair. It's clear to anyone with a pulse that barring health issues Trump is going to be the nominee, so the "Trump Can't Win" crowd have moved on from trying to build DeSantis up to tearing Trump, and anyone adjacent down. They were never that far away from that, but now there's not even a figleaf.
This article is veddy interesting. As a Jew, I have my own doubts about Vivek Naziswami.
Naziswamui is the Barack Hussein Obama of the Republican party.
That is not enough. And he doesn’t have the right opponents in my view as Trump supporter, Pamela Geller, does not like him.
I see Vivek as a common grifter.
He took Soro dollars (from Paul Soros) to go to law school - at the time he was a millionaire.
Worst of all possible worlds - he’s a lawyer and a wannabe politician.
No thanks!
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