That Time Vivek Ramaswamy Fleeced Your Grandma, Who Has Alzheimer's

How to make millions while screwing people.

If you ask grinning asshat Vivek Ramaswamy what is the most pressing problem in America, you get some rapid-fire spiel about wokism and diversity and teenagers choosing their pronouns and whatnot. And if you ask all us Marxist radicals here at Wonkette the same question, we’ll tell you that one of our most pressing problems is rapacious shitweasels like Vivek Ramaswamy earning obscene amounts of money by screwing over lots of people.

Since the latter has been going on practically since the invention of capitalism while wingnuts decided the former is a civilization-endangering crisis about ten minutes ago, we think we’ve got the better argument.

Anyway, this week we have been reading about how Ramaswamy drove up his biotech company’s share prices by hyping a drug to treat Alzheimer’s, then cashed out just before the drug failed its FDA trials and the company’s stock nosedived harder than Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plane. Don’t worry, though, because Ramaswamy felt super-bad about it. Then he dried his tears with a thousand-dollar bill and went on to the next grift.

Fine, Let's Talk About Vivek Ramaswamy

Vivek Ramaswamy Gets Schooled In Foreign Policy By ... Brian Kilmeade? Brian Kilmeade.

Here’s how it went: Ramaswamy had the idea to buy the patents for drugs that the Big Pharma companies had shelved for whatever reason (they didn’t work, they were too expensive to ever be profitable), then develop them and bring them to market for cheap. In 2014, he founded a company called Roivant (ROI, get it?) to carry out this plan.

Later that same year, he spun off a subsidiary called Axovant that bought from GlaxoSmithKline the patent for a drug intended to treat symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. GSK had shelved the drug after it failed a whole bunch of FDA trials. Axovant paid $5 million for the patent, dirt-cheap for this sort of thing.

Axovant had all of eight employees, including Ramaswamy’s mother and brother. Nonetheless, he managed to hype the company enough to take it public only a few months later, before it was anywhere near ready to take the drug, intepirdine, back to the FDA. The IPO was huge, driven mostly by Vivek’s bullshit, and suddenly this tiny company had a market capitalization of around $3 billion. At that point, the parent company Roivant had a 78 percent stake in Axovant.

Ramaswamy then spent a couple of years raising billions of dollars from investors for Roivant, partly on the strength of intepirdine being some sort of “wonder drug,” even while the company was reducing its own stake in Axovant to around 25 percent. Conveniently, this sell-off happened just before intepirdine failed its clinical trials again. When that happened, Axovant’s stock crashed, going from around $200 a share to 40 cents. Investors who had bought into Ramaswamy’s hype got fleeced.

Let’s let Fortune tell us What This Means:

Clearly, the facts show Ramaswamy’s words did not match his actions as he was busy cashing out while shamelessly hyping Axovant’s prospects in media interviews–almost resembling a classic pump-and-dump scheme. Some $40 million in personal windfalls is hardly “tiny.” 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.

During last week’s Republican primary debate, we made a crack about Ramaswamy reminding us of an old-timey traveling salesman selling miracle hair tonic out the back of his covered wagon. Hey, we weren’t too far off!

For his part, Mr. Pump ‘n Dump now claims he wasn’t hyping the drug so much as he was hyping the high-risk high-reward business model of a parent company buying up failed drug patents and reworking them to get them to market on the cheap. But small investors who listened to him lost actual money:

One large public pension fund, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, sold its stake months later, when it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars less than in the days leading up to the disappointing clinical trial news. 

Sorry, can’t hear you over the editrix Rebecca screaming in the chat cave that her poor mom, who has Alzheimer’s, relies entirely on her CALSTRS pension (see above), which is a pretty neat two for one for Ramaswamy. Somebody should give Rebecca some kind of a “pill.”

Ramaswamy claims that the failure of intepirdine eats at him. Though apparently not enough to learn from this failure that maybe America’s stupid health care system, which allows private companies to make gazillions of dollars by hoarding the patents for life-saving drugs while hyping their unproven effects, all in the service of relieving everyday investors of both hope and their life savings, might need significant reforms.

In fact, his stated goal of destroying the administrative state would increase opportunities for hustlers like himself to get extremely rich while screwing people who put their faith in him, all while facing absolutely no consequences.

Oh, to be an amoral sociopath with a desperate need for fame and money and the learning skills of a fudge round.

[Fortune / New York Times]