Vivek Ramaswamy — as a top-tier hedge fund investor, a bona fide member of the parasitic class of financier elites who leech off of American largesse while producing themselves nothing of value — recently recaptured my attention after his vile anti-American rant extolling the superiority of Indian culture over American culture, which is an odd thing to do for someone who could easily hit the airport and retire in his native land and live out the rest of his life in luxury with the millions of dollars, approaching a billion, in ill-gotten gains off the backs of American workers.
But it seems like he’d rather stay in the United States and make more money milking the rubes he holds in contempt.
For those who haven’t seen it, here’s what Ramaswamy thinks of America, and Americans, dripping with condescension and self-righteousness:
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024
Above and elsewhere, Vivek likes to market himself as a do-gooder medical tech innovator striving to make America a healthier, happier place. With all that talk above about “weekend science competitions” and math tutoring, one might be led to assume that he’s in the lab in a white coat cooking up life-saving magic elixirs.
Alas, that is not who he is, nor who he has ever been in his career.
What he actually is, and has been since graduating from the Ivy League, is a hedge fund investor and venture capitalist who produces nothing of his own but bets on drugs that other pharma innovators have abandoned because they don’t work, in some cases acquiring them for pennies on the dollar and then repackaging them and trying to sell them based off of sketchy clinical trials.
How did Vivek make the bulk of his fortune?
About a decade ago, he got his hands on the license for a drug no one else wanted that had failed four clinical trials by the time he acquired it. Through a relentless media hype campaign, he roped a bunch of investors, including small-time mom-and-pop ones with little expendable income, in with wild promises of producing a breakthrough Alzheimer’s drug and reaping windfall profits — all the while quietly selling off, at the very same time, his own shares for massive personal enrichment because he knew the drug he was peddling didn’t work even though he said literally the opposite in public.
Then it crashed and burned.
Via Fortune (emphasis added):
Ramaswamy’s tax records show that the first time he ever made big money was when he hyped up an Alzheimer’s drug candidate, Axovant, which had been discarded by other pharmaceutical companies. Axovant, which was 78% owned by Ramaswamy’s corporate holding company Roivant, blew up after failing FDA tests, with the stock crashing from $200 to 40 cents, fleecing thousands of mom-and-pop investors who bought into the hype. Ramaswamy himself profited handsomely (even if the Ramaswamy campaign took a while to acknowledge the truth).
Ramaswamy spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin first told us that “the idea that Vivek made any money on [Axovant’s] failure is a total lie” before finally acknowledging that Ramaswamy did indeed cash out, claiming “[Ramaswamy] and other shareholders were forced to sell a tiny portion of their shares in 2015 to facilitate an outside investor entering Roivant.” The facts are that Ramaswamy’s own tax returns show he opportunely sold out of nearly $40 million of Roivant stock right as Axovant’s hype was peaking. Meanwhile, Roivant was raising $500 million driven largely by Axovant. As Ramaswamy was busy selling his own personal stake, Roivant gradually reduced and diluted its Axovant stake from 78% to just 25%...
Ramaswamy was not “forced to sell” as that was clearly a personal choice without anyone holding a gun to his head. Amazingly, Ramaswamy’s spokesperson further confirmed to us that Ramaswamy was aware that 99.7% of all drugs tested for Alzheimer’s fail even though he was relentlessly hyping Axovant’s chances of success with nary a mention of that inconvenient truth.
(Because Vivek is trained in biology in the Ivy League, it’s probable that he knew all along that Axovant was doomed to fail from the start because these drugs do not target the root cause of Alzheimer’s. All they attempt to do is mask the symptoms for a very brief period without altering the course of disease progression. None of this, obviously, ever came into the conversation when Vivek was selling it on television.)
Related: Funding Bill Includes Cash for a DOZEN Biolabs to ‘Research’/Engineer New Viruses
Somehow Axovant, and his pump-and-dump scheme to get rich off of the hopes and fears of American families, never makes it into Vivek’s stump speeches.
Now that Vivek has reinvented himself as a freedom-loving, flag-waving MAGA patriot (who wants to import culturally superior Indian wage-slaves to take American engineering jobs because we’re all stupid jocks), neither will you hear much from him about what he was up to during COVID-19, which was partnering with Francis Collins’ NIH to sell Americans’ private medical data in an effort to capitalize off of COVID terror and the consequent windfall profits available to firms like his who could suck money out of the public treasury for private profit in the midst of the hysteria.
Via The Dossier (emphasis added):
Before rebranding as a warrior for free speech and a passionate crusader for privacy rights, newly announced presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy was pitching the U.S. and world governments on his efforts to install a broad, centralized database of private medical records.
In a pursuit forged through one of his subsidiary companies, a 'health information' data mining outfit called Datavant, Ramaswamy’s outfit pursued the establishment of a single national and global database for all covid-related patient health records.
Through a partnership with Snowflake, a San Francisco based cloud computing company, Ramaswamy wanted to 'fight covid-19' by manufacturing a 'single repository of all the real-world medical data' thanks to the production of a “national data infrastructure” of private and public patient records, all without the consent of the actual patients.
Datavant claimed the records would be anonymized through their internal systems and that the broad database would only be available to researchers and government officials. However, some weren’t buying the sales pitch, citing gross violations of medical privacy. Moreover, none of the methods to supposedly anonymize records were made open source for review.
Nonetheless Ramaswamy’s Datavant sought to profit off of the hysteria and violate basic ethical standards in the process. They succeeded in establishing a partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Related: SHOCK Poll: A Quarter of Americans Say They Know Someone Personally Killed by COVID Jab
You also will hear very little from Vivek about his prior George Soros connections, the details of which he paid to have removed from his own Wikipedia page when he discovered his political ambitions.
Via Mediate (emphasis added):
Vivek Ramaswamy has accused his prospective Republican rivals of parroting him, but Ramaswamy himself has made an intentional effort to conceal his own biography, even paying a Wikipedia editor to remove potentially politically damaging details about his past from his page.
Ramaswamy’s Wikipedia page includes the warning, “this article has multiple issues,” with a note that it “contains paid contributions” and “may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia’s content policies, particularly neutral point of view.”
The source of these concerns are changes made by an editor with the screen name “Jhofferman,” who has disclosed that he was paid by Ramaswamy to make alterations to the page.
According to the article’s version history, the editor removed lines about Ramaswamy’s receipt of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2011. Paul Soros was the older brother of billionaire funder of leftist causes George Soros, who was the biggest individual political donor in the United States during the 2022 election cycle. Also removed from the page on February 9, 2023 was Ramaswamy’s role on the state of Ohio’s Covid-19 Response Team. The editor recorded that Ramaswamy’s Covid-era work was removed from the article by the candidate’s own explicit request, while his Soros fellowship was deemed “extraneous material” by the editor.
With all that background established, I am of the opinion that this sleazy greaseball has no business being in the United States, and even less in any America First movement. If it were up to me, I’d make him the case study for Trump’s pledge to end birthright citizenship and send him on an all-expenses-paid trip back to India.
