Who is Vivek Ramaswamy? Ohio entrepreneur, 37, dubbed ‘CEO of Anti-Woke Inc’ mulls 2024 presidential run
DES MOINES, IOWA: Vivek Ramaswamy, 37, an entrepreneur and the founder of a biotech company also dubbed “CEO of Anti-Woke Inc” is considering a run for the presidency in 2024. The New York Times bestseller is a billionaire who has also become a fixture on Tucker Carlson’s show.
The son of Indian immigrants from Cincinnati, Ohio, is visiting many states, especially those that hold primary elections. It is to gauge interest in what he expects to offer in a prospective 2024 Republican primary run. On Monday, February 13, 2023, he was in Iowa to address a crowd and attend other multiple events.
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"We are in the middle of a national identity crisis," Ramaswamy told Daily Mail on Monday, February 13. "We lack a good answer to the question – of what it means to be an American in the year 2023. This leaves a vacuum for secular religions to come through whether that be woke-ism or even COVID-ism," he said.
A New Yorker profile of the entrepreneur in December 2022 dubbed Ramaswamy as "The CEO of Anti-Woke, Inc." His father is a general electric engineer and his mother is a geriatric psychiatrist. He attended Harvard and then Yale Law. He made a name by becoming a successful entrepreneur for his biotech company named Axovant Sciences. The company went public in June 2015 on the New York Stock Exchange and was the largest biotech IPO in the United States. Vivek Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences which buys forgotten and abandoned drugs to develop them. He has five drugs that are FDA approved as per Politico. More recently he wrote two books one is a top seller named “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.”
He said, "I'm starting a conversation that is overdue in our country and sensing a hunger for Americans to have that conversation," asking, "Can I lead that conversation?... Do Americans share that conviction? If that's yes, then I think I will take the next step."
He first thought about running for public office in 2021, when he debated running for the Ohio Senate. He ultimately decided against it. "One of your main jobs as a senator is to make laws, and I came to understand that many senators were not interested in engaging in that job,” he said. “Their goal was to get on cable television, and I was already on cable television.”
On the first day of his Iowa trip, Ramaswamy spoke to a group of Iowa Republicans. Iowa State Senate President Amy Sinclair introduced him, calling herself a “Twitter groupie” and plugging his books. The next day, he made an appearance at the Land Investment Expo in Des Moines, where he spoke to a crowd of 2,000 farmers and other people working in agriculture.
During the event as per the report, he was approached by several people to "run for president". A couple from Kansas, Renae, and Peter Hughes who are wheat farmers and also work as a CPA and banker, respectively told him “you have our vote." They even told him he was “a breath of fresh air.” Ramaswamy responded by telling the couple, “Hopefully we can translate that into action.”
Although Ramaswamy has had similar receptions on his 20 tours or so for his book “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.” The compliments he received on the Iowa trip were "humbling" which led him to believe he should give the presidential campaign a shot.
"I think the GOP has a historic opportunity to answer the question of what it means to be an American at the moment where we lack a national identity,” he said. “I’m grateful that many Republican governors and other leaders have borrowed my message and woven it into their policy agendas. But when it comes to who leads our country next, I believe that it’s going to take a leader who shares his own vision, not someone else’s, and that’s what calls me to do this.”