I’d say he’s done at least as well in business as Chris Christie, Ron the Sanctimonious, Nimrod-duh Haley, Asahole Hutchinson, and the rest in the businesses they’ve started and built to a market cap of $10 billion, or maybe just a bit better...
Is Vivek Ramaswamy the Biz Whiz He Claims to Be? Burned Investors Might Disagree
Vivek Ramaswamy, the fast-talking, Ivy League-educated, telegenic political phenom thrills Republican voters, infuriates his presidential primary opponents and styles himself as an entrepreneurial “scientist” with a glittering business background and hundreds of millions of dollars to dump into his out-of-nowhere campaign for the White House.
But a review of Ramaswamy’s career – marked by the hyping of a failed Alzheimer’s drug, giant payouts when other investors got burned, lawsuits alleging pressure to break securities laws and more – reveals a businessperson whose true liquid net worth is unknown and whose track record as a successful entrepreneur shows limited value creation for anyone other than himself.
Alzheimer’s Drug Failure
By far the most prominent effort – and biggest failure – in Ramaswamy’s business career came when his biotech company, Axovant Sciences, acquired rights to a potential drug to fight Alzheimer’s disease.
Axovant was a brand-new company. And beyond an undergraduate degree in biology, Ramaswamy had no experience in pharmaceutical research or any further scientific training. The drug was called Intepirdine, and the $34.6 billion pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, having given up on the drug’s prospects, sold it to Axovant for $5 million and other considerations.
Ramaswamy rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange in June of 2015 – alongside his new bride – when Axovant became the biggest-ever biotech IPO at the time, raising $315 million and eventually winning a valuation of $3 billion.