Here's a popular tweet making the rounds:
How populist "entrepreneur" Vivek Ramaswamy got rich:
1. Found biotech firm with hedge fund/venture capital $
2. Buy patent for Alzheimer's drug that had failed 4 trials, raise more $ to take to market
3. Take company public, cash out
4. Drug fails 5th trial, investors wiped out.— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) August 24, 2023
This is actually all true, but it's not the whole story. In 2014, after working for a hedge fund as a biotech investor, Ramaswamy started up Roivant Sciences, which was originally intended to buy the rights to castoff drugs and then continue developing them. His first deal was completed by a Roivant subsidiary called Axovant. Among other things, Ramaswamy:
- Bought the rights to intepirdine, a failed Alzheimer's drug, for almost nothing in December 2014.
- Took Axovant public in June 2015.
- Somehow talked up its value to $3 billion before cashing out in December 2015.
Unsurprisingly, intepirdine failed yet another clinical trial and Axovant collapsed. Before that happened, however, it had made a bunch of money for Ramaswamy in the space of a mere 12 months. Not bad!
However, as ugly as that was, it's only one part of Roivant. Through its myriad subsidiaries, Roivant bought a lot of drugs and has successfully brought several to market with more on the way. But Roivant also branched out. A subsidiary called Datavant, for example, helps researchers share clinical data securely. By 2021 it had $700 million in revenue and merged with Ciox Health in a deal valued at $7 billion. Roivant has also developed other data products over the past few years. It went public a couple of years ago and is currently trading at more than 70% above its IPO price:
Ramaswamy certainly has a silver tongue, but there's more to him than that. His Alzheimer's play failed spectacularly, but he had plenty of other irons in the fire:
Mr. Ramaswamy’s resilience was in part a result of the savvy way he structured his web of biotechnology companies. But it also highlights his particular skills in generating hype, hope and risky speculation in an industry that feeds on all three. “A lot of it had substance. Some of it did not. He’s a sort of a Music Man,” said Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat and former health secretary during the Obama administration who advised two of Mr. Ramaswamy’s companies.
Ramaswamy still has a stake in Roivant, which accounts for about half of his billion-dollar fortune. The other half comes from money he made along the way.
He's a twat but he's an actual billionaire, unlike Trump
A less crooked version of Elizabeth Holmes.
No, Ms Holmes was an outright fraudster who never had either a product or basic proper science.
His company was making attempts at retreading existing drugs, and as Drum highlighted, some of those attempts worked.
Really utterly different.
You can properly dislike him for his smarmy and likely opportunistic political persona.
No need to engage in MAGA-esque distortions
A less entertaining Elon Musk.
I'd actually argue that he's more capable than Musk. Musk is just a bumbling man-child who got rich off of other people's ideas and has no idea what he's doing with anything.
I guess "at least" Ramaswamy did it the old fashioned slimy capitalist way via big pharma.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of reducing the cost of getting into orbit, put up the initial money, and hired Tom Mueller and Gwynne Shotwell. I give him credit for the vision, the funding, and finding the right people to enact his vision.
Yes, the people he hired are the ones who achieved SpaceX's accomplishments. But Musk put up the money, got them to join the team, and pointed them in what turned out to be the right direction. That isn't nothing. Yes, Musk did get government contracts, but that's the art of having a vision and demonstrating enough of the vision to get others to buy in and supply the resources needed to complete your vision.
ULA, Blue Origin, and the rest of the folks striving for access to space haven't gotten nearly as far. Why is that? I think it's because they didn't have the vision or the drive that SpaceX has, and that vision and drive originates with Musk.
Defenses of Musk (and Ramaswamy) are, to me, highly reminiscent of defenses of Trump’s abilities as a developer by bringing up the Wollman Rink.
Yah. Musk's track record re: PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX do suggest intelligence. But it is now clear that the suggestion is misleading. He just got lucky, three times in a row. (Hey, these things can happen. Every casino dealer has stories.) In the past year or so his stupidity and impulsiveness have become clear even to casual observers.
My biggest takeaway from the debate was that he is some combination of vicious fascist and fervent sociopath.
Well, how does anyone become a billionaire at age 38? Suckers. Yes -- suckers.
Evidently 'suckers' include actual successful drug usages....
An opinion every bit as useful and edifying as the MAGA fools who label Biden a communist because Democrat.
sftp has been helping people share data securely for about 25 years. For the life of me I can't figure out why people needed insecure products, like Moveit, and not yet found to be insecure proprietary stuff like Datavant. Would it really have been that hard to create a standard protocol for exchanging patient data and tunneling it over ssh?
This line of argument reminds me a bit of the criticism of Pete Buttigieg and his former employment with McKinsey.
Something in the neighborhood of 80% plus of biotech startups fail. Roivant had $700 million in revenue. I disagree with Ramaswamy's politics and do not think he is a business fraud...
Precisely, he clearly had some combination of actual ability and of course luck.
By outtakes Edward Luce of Financial Time's bon mot, "utter twat" is sufficient.
He boosted the stock price and then got out before the clinical trial results were in. A refined version of “pump & dump”. Illegal if done too brazenly and with clear intent to mislead (like if one sold on the basis of not public preliminary trial data) but always slimy and unethical.
The Axovant pump-and-dump is pure trump, a replay of the way The Dealmaker cashed out of Atlantic City and left shareholders holding the empty bag. David Cay Johnston has that one covered.
For the rest, it isn't clear from this whether Ramaswamy was buying up additional drugs already in development, or buying up neglected niche-type drugs, or doing new-drug development. The latter is really expensive and I thought usually left for the industry behemoths. The "neglected" meds market was Martin Shkreli's playground (for a while). The nuances can be important.
But basically he sounds kind of like a techbro trump.
I don't understand why anyone is paying attention to Ramaswamy. He is irrelevant, because there is exactly zero chance that a majority of white Christian conservatives will vote for a brown-skinned Hindu.
Likelihood of VP position for Mr Trump presumably.
No, he can't be veep, either, because then his name would be on the ticket and that's too much of a poison pill for white Christian conservatives. (And I'm still betting Trump's veep will be RFK Jr.)
I'm thinking Ramaswamy is actually auditioning for a cabinet position. Secretary of Commerce, or maybe HHS.
The question is why is Ramaswamy in this at all? He is a smart guy and I’m sure he knows he has no chance at the Presidency or even vice presidency.
I think he is making a bet, perhaps a long-shot bet, that Trump will win and this country will become an autocracy. He wants to be a high official in that autocracy with all the perks that would entail. If his bet fails that’s ok too. He will have gotten lots of press notoriety and will have lots of grifting opportunities. It’s a win-win for him.
In my job, I’ve had occasions to work with lots of folks from India. Some who I got to know reasonably well were open about corruption and dishonesty and on a couple of occasions expected me to participate. Others were just particularly awful corporate hacks. A few of the mostly younger guys (all but one were men) seemed nice enough, but I didn’t get to know them. It was generally unpleasant so Mr. Vivek seems quite in character.
Some seem to assume that immigrants are naturally liberal leaning but I don’t think this is the case at all. Especially not those I’ve encountered.
Anyway… I’m disgusted by the so called journalism around elections and debates like this one in particular. It’s really awful.
Seems like I lost the edit function. It was generally unpleasant to work with people from India so Mr. Vivek is in character.
Wow!
I've worked with quite a number of people from India. Also people from a lot of other countries. I don't share your impressions at all. Yes, some were liars and jerks, but the great majority were fine. I don't see any real difference in the prevalence of these qualities between immigrants/foreigners and native born people.
I will say that I've seen many foreign companies that will be happy to cheat you. I don't really know that they are worse than US companies. We were usually only doing business with them because some hoho in the corporate office wanted to screw the domestic supplier. It does make it easier to get away with funny business if the customer is thousands of miles away.
We must change how we cover the wealthy.
I propose we cover them with savory sauces and spices, after flame-broiling them to perfection.
This guy has successfully convinced the media into breathless coverage of himself , just like Trump did during his first run.
While he stands no chance of winning the GOP race, he will now be able to steal money from FoxNews Grandpas for the next 2 decades. Im sure this was always the goal. Lots of grifting to be done.
I'm almost shocked that Trump has not yet resorted to nicknaming him Ramalamadingdong (Trump is, after all, from that age group), but perhaps it's just that he doesn't see Mr. Ramaswamy as a threat just yet.
He’s not a threat, he’s helping Trump by siphoning votes from DeSantis. If Trump wanted to destroy him he would call him RamaSoros.
Makes you wonder, if they're not running against Trump, why are they running?