Vivek Ramaswamy Emerges as a Leading Contender in 2024, Check Out What Makes Him Tick

Vivek Ramaswamy is the most recent businessman to switch careers and enter politics. The Republican nominee for president in 2024 is only the latest in a long line of successful businesspeople who have sought the presidency. The 38-year-old Ramaswamy is also making headlines because he is one of the richest candidates in history. According to Business Insider, he was also the top student in his graduating class in high school. He received his undergraduate degree in biology from Harvard University with honors and then his J.D. from Yale.

As per Time, Ramaswamy was born in Cincinnati to parents who came from India in quest of the American Dream. His parents, who migrated to the United States with little money, settled in different professions after they arrived. Their lessons to him were more cultural than political in nature. He further told the outlet, "That was sort of what we cared more about, Moral foundations." A conservative Christian piano instructor who praised Ronald Reagan was among the early influences on his political development as a teenager. He added, "She probably influenced me with modes of conservative thought that I probably wouldn't have thought about in the past. Which were really the groundedness and importance of family, and sort of calling my attention to how blessed I was to grow up in a stable family environment like the one that I was in."

During his undergrad years, his calendar was filled with club tennis, the South Asian Association, and the search committee for a new university president. Interestingly, rapping as "Da Vek," he became a leader in student groups including the Harvard Political Union and the Institute for Politics. He said, "I mostly, through college, considered myself a libertarian, a pretty staunch libertarian." After finishing college in 2007, he went to work at QVT Financial LP, a hedge fund, and by the time he was 28, he became a partner. He studied law at Yale at the same time. Ramaswamy speculates that it was during this time that he initially entertained the idea of a political career. He further added, "I considered it briefly, the idea of possibly doing it at some point, when I was in law school."

It was the year 2021, Ramaswamy resigned as CEO of Roivant and went on to publish the New York Times best book Woke, Inc. Later on he became a regular on Fox News. He and Frericks established Strive as an investment management business with the stated mission of putting shareholder value ahead of anything else. In a short amount of time, he had written a second book, this one a critique of victim mentalities and identity politics. He claimed he received requests to run for Senate in Ohio as he made hundreds of cable news appearances and gave serious consideration to doing so.

On February 21 he announced that he was running for President, as he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "To put America first, we need to rediscover what America is. That’s why I am running for president, I am launching not only a political campaign but a cultural movement to create a new American Dream—one that is not only about money but about the unapologetic pursuit of excellence. We embrace secular religions like climatism, Covidism and gender ideology to satisfy our need for meaning, yet we can’t answer what it means to be an American. The Republican Party’s top priority should be to fill this void with an inspiring national identity that dilutes the woke agenda to irrelevance." Ramaswamy has been campaigning for months, making stops in every state. While most of this has taken place in town halls in the early states, he has also made an effort to appear in areas Republican politicians seldom attend, such as a Black barbershop in Chicago, where he had his hair clipped while discussing illegal immigration.