In his longshot White House bid, Ramaswamy is leaning into his second act – as a slick-talking culture warrior – rather than his first: a Harvard educated biologist and Yale-trained lawyer who made a fortune on Wall Street.
estimates Ramaswamy pocketed less than $1 million from the deal.
Ramaswamy then spent his twenties investing in pharma companies at hedge fund QVT Financial, where he made partner at the age of 28. In 2014, he left to found Roivant Sciences, a biotech firm that buys potentially lucrative drug candidates discarded by the big pharmaceutical firms and works to develop them. Most of Ramaswamy’s fortune stems from an 8% stake in the publicly traded Roivant, which has a market capitalization of $6.6 billion.
Roivant’s high-risk-high-reward business model has been a hit with Wall Street investors, despite a mixed track record in developing drugs that received FDA approval. One of Roivant’s big bets, Axovant Sciences, went public in 2015 at a $2.2 billion valuation, on the basis of a much-hyped Alzheimer’s drug candidate that ultimately flopped two years later. Axovant was renamed Sio Gene Therapies and now is worth just $30 million.
In 2021, after Ramaswamy had stepped down as CEO, Roivant listed on the Nasdaq exchange at a $7.4 billion valuation, through a reverse merger with Montes Archimedes Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition vehicle. As of the end of last year, Roivant held around $1.5 billion in cash on its balance sheet, largely from that merger and previous fundraising. The company has never been profitable.
Ramaswamy’s 54.4 million shares in Roivant were worth $475 million, as of Tuesday’s market close. Since the IPO, he has sold Roivant stock on just one occasion–in February this year–when he
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