Vivek Ramaswamy Net Worth 2024: Making $950 Million With Pharma and Politics

Vivek Ramaswamy, the American entrepreneur who recently dropped out of the presidential race, was the 3rd wealthiest person competing for the highest position in the country, surpassed by only Donald Trump and Doug Burgum (though Burgum barely reached 1% in the GOP primary polls).

In 2024, Vivek Ramaswamy’s net worth is around $950 million.

Ramaswamy is a self-made millionaire who founded a pharmaceutical company named Roivant Sciences, among other businesses and profitable investments. His story is inspirational and unique, and in this post, we’ll explore the factors that contributed to his steep net worth.

7 Fun Facts About Vivek Ramaswamy

1. Self-Made Millionaire: Ramaswamy was reportedly worth $15 million before graduating from Yale.
2. Pharma Visionary: Founded Roivant Sciences, known for buying underdeveloped drugs from major companies and bringing them to market.
3. Published Author: He authored Woke, Inc. in 2021, criticizing corporate America’s focus on social justice.
4. Political Debater: Gained attention during the Republican primary debates for his outspoken views.
5. Musical Talent: Performed rap music in college under the stage name “Da Vek.”
6. Strive Asset Management: Co-founded an “anti-woke” investment fund that quickly grew to over $1 billion in assets.
7. Potential VP: After dropping out of the presidential race, he endorsed Trump, sparking speculation about a VP nod.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Net Worth: Full Breakdown

Not long ago, Ramaswamy’s estimated net worth crossed the billion-dollar threshold, but it has recently dropped due to massive amount of money he invested in his presidential campaign. A steep drop in Roivant stock and the pharmaceutical market in general pulled him further away from the billionaire title too.

Even so, the businessman remains one of the wealthiest politicians in the US, standing in the ranks of Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Based on our detailed research of his earnings, investments, and spending over the years, we created a breakdown of his main assets below:

Vivek Ramaswamy Early Life, Education, and Family

Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on August 9, 1985.

His parents, who were Indian Hindu immigrants, came to the United States from the Palakkad district in Kerala, India, where they lived in a traditional Agraharam in Vadakkencherry.

His father, V. Ganapathy Ramaswamy, worked as a patent attorney and engineer for General Electric, and his mother, Geetha Ramaswamy, worked as a geriatric psychiatrist. The family visited Palakkad for the holidays, where young Vivek showed great interest in the Indian judiciary system.

At one point, his grandfather Muthuswamy, a lawyer, took him to the court to see how it worked, and Vivek left even more impressed by how the institution functioned.

Education

Ramaswamy was raised in Ohio, where he attended the local Hindu temple in Dayton and took private piano lessons in elementary and high school.

He studied at public schools until the eighth grade, after which he enrolled in a Catholic school called St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati. He was the definition of an overachiever – a good pianist, a valedictorian of the Jesuit high school where he studied, and a nationally-ranked tennis player.

After his high school graduation, Ramaswamy enrolled in Harvard College, where he obtained his Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in biology. He was also a Phi Beta Kappa fraternity member and the Harvard Political Union president, showing his talent for politics and debating from an early age. His senior thesis was about the ethical questions that arise from creating human-animal chimeras, for which he won a Bowdoin Prize.

In a candidate forum on October 27, 2003, the young Vivek questioned Al Sharpton, who was running for president at the time:

While in college, young Vivek Ramaswamy performed Eminem covers and other rap music under the stage name ‘Da Vek‘. He also interned for the hedge fund Amaranth Advisors, followed by a short interning stint at Goldman Sachs.

In 2011, when he was completing his education, Ramaswamy got a post-graduate fellowship from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.

He used this fellowship to enroll in Yale Law School.

Interestingly, the young student was already pretty rich from his activities in various industries such as finance, biotech, and pharmaceutical. In 2023, he even shared that his net worth was around $15 million before he even graduated from Yale, though the details of how he earned his millions (assuming he was telling the truth) have never been disclosed.

What we do know is that, while at university, he worked in finance and invested heavily in pharmaceutical and biotech companies. He even co-founded and sold his first social networking business for an undisclosed price.

In 2013, Ramaswamy earned a Juris Doctor degree from Yale, a type of graduate degree that prepares students to start practicing law.

Personal Life

While at Yale, Ramaswamy met his future wife, Apoorva Tewari Ramaswamy, a laryngologist and a surgeon. The couple married in 2015 and has two sons.

Vivek Ramaswamy Net Worth: From Pharma to Politics

Ramaswamy was a very successful student who instantly jumped into the business world when he obtained his college degree. Let’s see how this led him to founding his multibillion-dollar venture and eventually led him to politics.

Early Career

In 2007, after his college graduation, Ramaswamy co-founded Campus Venture Network, a business that published a private social networking website for students who wanted to start their first business. He co-founded this venture with Travis May and sold it to the nonprofit Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation two years later.

At around the same time he started the company, Ramaswamy started working in the hedge fund QVT, specializing in pharmaceutical investments. In the first seven years of his work at QVT, he earned $7 million.

By the time he was 28 years old, he had become a partner at the hedge fund and managed its biotech portfolio. Some of his biggest investments as a biotech investor for QVT were in Palatin Technologies, Pharmasset, Retrophin, and Concert Pharmaceuticals. What’s more impressive about this time is that he was simultaneously studying at Yale.

A year after he made partner, he decided to leave his job at QVT to start another venture, an investment firm he called Roivant Sciences.

The Beginning and Success of Roivant Sciences

Ramaswamy started Sciences with the backing of QVT. The company’s name refers to ‘return on investment’, and was incorporated in Bermuda with a start-up capital of almost $100 million from investors like QVT, Visium Asset Management, Falcon Edge Capital, D.E. Shaw & Co., and RA Capital Management.

Vivek Ramaswamy had the idea to buy patents from big companies in the pharmaceutical industry for promising drugs that haven’t been developed yet and help them bring those drugs to the market. The idea was to focus on drugs that Pharma companies have abandoned and would make a fortune if someone still pushed them to be brought to the market. This is quite an impressive endeavor because it takes an absurd amount of money to get a drug approved by the FDA (generally between $314 million and $2.8 billion for a single drug).

Over the years, Roivant created several subsidiaries such as Urovant, which focused on urological diseases, Dermavant, which focused on dermatology, and Sinogant and Cytovant, which focused in on the Asian market.

The Failure of Axovant

Roivant’s strategy was a success almost immediately. A year after he founded it, one of the company’s spinoffs, Axovant, went public at a valuation of $2.2 billion! Its most prized asset was an Alzheimer’s drug candidate called Intepirdine, which Ramaswamy bought for $5 million from GlaxoSmithKline in December 2014. This was the biggest biotech IPO ever with the company going public at $15 and closing at $29 per share.

Following the IPO, the founder sold an undisclosed portion of his Roivant shares to Viking Global Investors.

The same year the Roivant subsidiary Axovant went public on the New York stock market, Ramaswarmy reported over $38 million of income on his tax returns, most of which came from capital gains. That same year, Forbes placed him on their cover, sharing his statement that the company would ‘be the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry.’

Not long after, Axovant was the Wall Street ‘darling,’ raising $315 million at the IPO. This made the company’s IPO skyrocket to $3 billion with only eight employees, three of whom came from Ramaswamy’s family.

However, despite it being a very promising drug, Intepirdine turned out to be a major disappointment when it failed its final clinical trial in 2017.

This kind of failure at the very last step before approval is always extremely devastating for any pharmaceutical firm. By this point, it had already spent at least tens of millions of dollars (more likely hundreds of millions) to earn zero revenue in return. The company’s value plunged immediately after. In a single day after the clinical trial failed, it lost 75% of its value and kept declining in the days that followed. Some of the biggest shareholders who lost money included institutional investors like the California State Teachers’ Retirement System Pension Fund.

Interestingly, Axovant remained active for years afterward and it was rebranded to Sio Gene Therapies in 2020. However, in 2023, it dissolved as a gene therapy company.

Ramaswamy didn’t suffer major losses since his stake was mostly in the parent company Roivant, not directly in Axovant, though he did have a stake in the business when its stock plummeted. He reportedly wound down his Axovant stock from 78% to 25% in 2022, though we don’t know how much he pocketed from this.

He also never revealed whether he sold his remaining stake before the business shut down a year later.

Roivant’s Major Deals

During Ramaswamy’s reign at Roivant, the company made multiple incredibly lucrative deals. In 2017, the company partnered with the private equity arm of the Chinese CITIC Group and formed Sinovant. That same year, the CEO Ramaswamy struck a deal with Masayoshi Son, which resulted in the visionary CEO’s investment firm, SoftBank, investing $1.1 billion in Roivant.

In 2018, the company raised $200 million in funding at a post-valuation of $7 billion, which was led by NovaQuest Capital Management.

In 2019, Roivant entered into a $3 billion deal with Sumitomo Danippon Pharma, a Japanese pharmaceutical company that purchased five of the drugs Roivant was developing, as well as an 11% stake in the company. Ramaswamy reportedly made $175 million in capital gains from this sale alone.

In 2020, Roivant established a social-impact arm, a nonprofit called Roivant Social Ventures or RSV. Before this nonprofit was formed, the business had a different version of the social organization called the Roivant Foundation, founded in 2018. RSV supported the ESG and pro-DEI initiatives and promoted diversity and health equity within the biopharma and biotech industries. Later on, when Ramaswamy became a GOP presidential candidate, he argued that DEI and ESG run counter to fiduciary duty, downplaying his role in the management of RSV.

Stepping Down as Roivant’s CEO

In January 2021, Ramaswamy stepped down as CEO of Roivant, assuming the role of executive chairman. That same year, Roivant went public on the Nasdaq via a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition vehicle Montes Archimedes Acquisition Corp.

Two years later, in February 2023, Ramaswamy stepped down as chair of the company, leaving it completely to focus on his presidential campaign.

Despite leaving Roivant’s leadership team, Ramaswamy is still one of the company’s biggest shareholders. He is the sixth-largest shareholder with a 7.17% stake in the company. Based on the market capitalization of the business as of May 2024, which is $9.17 billion, Ramaswamy’s stake is currently worth $657,489,000.

According to Forbes calculations, Ramaswamy has earned over $260 million in Roivant in the form of capital gains, salary, and bonuses over the years.

Authorship

Right after Ramaswamy stepped down as the CEO of Roivant and got into politics, he published his first authored book called Woke, Inc., criticizing the focus of corporate America on social justice issues and the ESG movement in Wall Street. This was the basis for his next business, the anti-woke index fund provider Strive, which we will discuss shortly.

Politics and Presidential Campaign

In February 2023, Ramaswamy declared his candidacy for the nomination in the 2024 United States presidential election. He was a Republican presidential candidate until January 2024, when he suspended his campaign after he finished fourth in Iowa’s caucuses.

The presidential candidate was politically active for years before this, having made significant political contributions to both Republicans and Democrats. For instance, in 2016, he donated to the campaign of a Florida Democrat running for Congress, Dena Grayson.

Between 2020 and 2023, he donated to the Ohio Republican Party and was even considered running in the US Senate election in Ohio in 2022.

In 2023, he announced his Republican presidential nomination on Tucker Carlson Tonight, later explaining in a Wall Street Journal editorial that his political campaign is ‘a cultural movement to create a new American dream for the next generation’. At the point of his Republican nomination, he released 20 years of his income tax returns. He was rather successful at fundraising, despite his consistently poor polling results. Ramaswamy loaned his campaign $15 million from his own net worth and pulled in around $6.4 million from donors.

This put his Ramaswamy’s campaign fundraising right behind that of former President Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, but also ahead of most other candidates in the Republican Presidential Primary.

During his campaign as a Republican Presidential candidate, Ramaswamy often attacked DeSantis, calling himself the ‘unapologetic American nationalist’.

However, he never directly criticized Donald Trump, likely fearing blowback from his base. Ramaswamy never really had much of a chance of beating Trump in the GOP primary so attacking him while playing to Trump’s own base at the same time wouldn’t have been very smart. Even when Trump was indicted on federal criminal charges just last year, he rallied behind him, promising to pardon him if elected president.

Ramaswamy was part of the first Republican Primary debate, as well as the second, but failed to qualify for the last one. GOP viewers seemed to like his performance in the debates for the most part but he didn’t distinguish himself from Trump to see any positive results in the polls.

Two days before the caucuses in Iowa, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, the social network, urging voters not to choose Vivek Ramaswamy and support his campaign.

Even so, after Ramaswamy’s campaign ended on January 15, 2024, the former candidate endorsed Trump for his campaign:

“This entire campaign is about speaking the TRUTH. We did not achieve our goal tonight & we need an America-First patriot in the White House. The people spoke loud & clear about who they wanted. Tonight I am suspending my campaign and endorsing Donald J. Trump and will do everything I can to make sure he is the next U.S. President. I am enormously proud of this team, this movement, and our country.”

Even though he dropped out of the race, this might not be an entirely unsuccessful campaign.

This support indicates that Vivek Ramaswamy might be Trump’s choice for VP if he wins the election, competing against other onetime rivals such as Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota, Elise Stefanik, a top New York House member, Tulsi Gabbard, the former House member from Hawaii, Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, and Marco Rubio, the Florida senator.

Trump won the Republican caucus in Iowa with 51% of votes with Ron DeSantis in second place with 21.2%, followed by Nikki Haley with 19.1%. After Iowa, he quickly ran away with the primary after the rest of his opponents dropped out due to poor results.

Vivek Ramaswamy Net Worth: Other Assets and Investments

Roivant was the businessman’s biggest success to date, but this is not his only business or investment. Over the years, he has created at least one other venture, authored a few books, invested in the stock market, and purchased assets in real estate, among other things.

Other Businesses

In 2020, while he was still the CEO of the company, Ramaswamy co-founded Chapter Medicare, a navigation platform for Medicare. He was also the chairman of OnCore Biopharma and chair of the board at Arbutus Biopharma.

In 2022, after leaving Roivant, he launched an “anti-woke” fund called Strive Asset Management with his high school friend Anson Frericks. Strive Asset Management is based in Ohio and raised around $20 million from investors like Peter Thiel, Bill Ackman, and J.D. Vance. In September 2023, the business had over $1 billion in assets under management within a year of the launch of its first fund.

Ramaswamy was Strive’s executive chairman until February 2023, when he resigned to focus on his presidential campaign, but he remains the business’ co-owner.

Investments in Stock

Earning millions every year, Ramaswamy has been investing heavily in various companies and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. He reportedly owns some shares in Rumble, YouTube’s competitor, and MoonPay, the crypto payments firm. The details of these investments remain undisclosed to the public.

Other Assets

In addition to his stock investments and his businesses, Ramaswamy has a rich real estate portfolio, and reportedly owns stakes in three private jets according to Forbes, though the details on the latter remain undisclosed.

As for his real estate, in May 2021, Vivek and Apoorva Ramaswamy spent $2 million on a property in Columbus, Ohio, a mansion near the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center, where Apoorva works.

In addition to this property, the family also owns their first Ohio home, worth half a million dollars.

What Can We Learn from Vivek Ramaswamy’s Story?

Vivek Ramaswamy’s story offers valuable lessons for everyone from politicians and writers to entrepreneurs and leaders.

Firstly, it highlights the importance of seizing opportunities and taking calculated risks in life. His willingness to venture into uncharted territories, whether it is in the business world or politics, teaches us the importance of stepping outside one’s comfort zone and taking risks to pursue your goals.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s journey to wealth started long before he entered the business world.

Even while at college, he displayed an entrepreneurial spirit and a key eye for making smart investments, turning himself into a millionaire even before his education ended. While pursuing his degree, he delved into various ventures, laying the groundwork for future success.

To be more, Ramaswamy’s journey teaches us the power of resilience in the face of adversity. Despite setbacks and challenges, such as the big failure of Axovant, the businessman remained steadfast in his pursuit of success.

Ramaswamy’s story emphasizes the importance of adaptation and innovation in a landscape that constantly changes. Over the years, he has identified market gaps, forged strategic partnerships, and pivoted when necessary to build a successful empire among fierce competition – not to mention from scratch!