Last year, the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy (Ohio, 1985) was one of Donald Trump’s main rivals for the Republican nomination in the US presidential election. Next year he will be one of your trusted men and a key part of his new administration.
It was this Tuesday that the newly elected president announced that Elon Musk And Vivek Ramaswamy They will be responsible for leading what was named after Ministry of Government Effectiveness (DOGE, in English). It will be, Trump said in a statement, “the Manhattan Project” of this era, bringing “drastic changes” to government with significant cuts to government agencies that he said are “bloated in the federal bureaucracy.” .
The good relationship is well known between Trump and Musksince founder of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of the X platform, politically and financially supported the Republican throughout his campaign. But why did Trump opt for Ramasyamy?
Ramaswamy, 39, was born in Cincinnati to an Indian immigrant family. He graduated from Harvard University in biology and received a J.D. from Yale Law School. He then began to amass his fortune by investing in the biotechnology sector.
In 2014 founded his own companyRoivant Sciences, which buys patents from pharmaceutical companies not yet developed or commercialized or acquires experimental drugs from other companies that do not have the resources to finance clinical trials. He then founded many others, like Axovantfocused on treatments for neurological diseases.
His investments allowed him to earn a fortune of more than 950 million dollarsaccording to the magazine Forbes end of 2023. In July last year, before being hit by a stock market setback, its assets exceeded the threshold of 1 billion dollarsmaking a place among the 20 youngest billionaires in the world USA.
Vivek Ramaswamy, with Donald Trump at a campaign event.
The leap into politics
Due to his business career, Ramaswamy has been nicknamed “the Trump of the millennium.” Also for your economic visionwhich he left captured in 2021 in a book titled Awake Inc.where he explained his ideas on capitalism and how the arrival of the free market lifted many people out of poverty.
Perhaps that’s why no one was surprised that in 2023 he decided to challenge the former president in the Republican race for the White House. For a few months, he was the candidate the youngest Republican in internal party elections, surpassing the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, 44 years old. But he finally decided to quit and become fervent acolyte of Trump.
In several meetings where he came to replace the Republican leader, he repeated Trump’s favorite phrases and defended theories of election fraud. Likewise, his message focused on defending budget cuts in government. For example, according to the BBCproposed eliminating the Department of Education and the FBI. Not to mention that he insisted on using the scissors to help Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
