Nikki Haley's SuperPAC Is Quietly Feeding The Media The Dirt
“Oppo research” or opposition research— used to discredit other candidates— is de rigueur in almost any modern election campaign. Firms are hired to collect biographical and medical— including the most personal— legal, criminal, political, educational and financial history. This week, NBC New reported Tim Scott has been whining that unspecified other campaigns have been insinuating that he’s a closet case (which he is).
Scott’s campaign has basically fallen apart since he’s terrible performance in the first debate. But he’s looking for something else to blame it on. The right-wing Real Clear Politics polling average shows him not even in contender status any longer:
Trump- 52.7%
DeSantis 14.2%
Ramaswamy- 6.6%
Haley- 6.2%
Pence- 4.8%
Christie- 3,4%
Scott- 2.3%
Elder- 0.5%
Burgum- 0.4%
Hutchinson- 0.4%
Hurd- 0.2%
Worse yet the post-debate poll by the Wall Street Journal is even less forgiving news for the South Carolina Republican:
Trump- 59% (up 11 since April)
DeSantis 13% (down 11)
Haley- 8% (up 3)
Ramaswamy- 5% (up 3)
Christie- 3% (up 3)
Pence- 2% (up 1)
Scott- 2% (down 1)
Burgum- 1% (up 1)
Hutchinson- 1% (up 1)
Elder- 0%
Hurd- 0%
In New Hampshire, Scott was asked about the Axios (life long bachelor) report that insinuated— without ever saying so— that he’s in the closet. He was taken aback ans had trouble formulating even a remotely coherent response: “People plant stories that have conversations to distract from our rise in the polls, to distract from our size of our audience,” Scott said. “What we’ve seen is that poll after poll says that the voters don’t care, but it seems like opponents do care, and so media coverage that opponents plant— it’s OK. Good news is we just keep fighting the good fight.”
Actually, he’s deluding himself if he thinks his plummeting poll numbers are rising. NBC reported that “Scott did not refer to a specific presidential rival in his answer. Since he entered public office in 1995 as a member of the Charleston, South Carolina, City Council, Scott has never publicly dated, a fact that has distinguished him from many of his colleagues and political opponents… In an interview with NBC News after his campaign launch in May, Scott did suggest he was actively dating. ‘There’s always time for a great relationship with a wonderful woman, and I thank God that that is happening,’ he said in May.”
Yep— a complete fraud. Not on a George Santos level-- but the media gave Santos a complete pass until it was too late for the voters. And… speaking of complete frauds and opposition research, people are saying that Nikki Haley’s campaign has been going to the media with the closet case stories on Tim Scott but also with the dirt on Vivek Ramaswamy… Although the Ramaswamy info has been circulating— loudly— for years. Until now, the mainstream media hasn’t been interested enough to bother to substantiate any of it. Now that he’s seen as serious contender for something— even if not president— people are starting to pay attention and even dig around a little.
Yesterday, Ben White reported on Ramaswamy’s shockingly unscrupulous past. He wrote that “the fast-talking, Ivy League-educated, telegenic political phenom thrills Republican voters, infuriates his presidential primary opponents and styles himself as an entrepreneurial ‘scientist’ with a glittering business background and hundreds of millions of dollars to dump into his out-of-nowhere campaign for the White House. But a review of Ramaswamy’s career— marked by the hyping of a failed Alzheimer's drug, giant payouts when other investors got burned, lawsuits alleging pressure to break securities laws and more— reveals a businessperson whose true liquid net worth is unknown and whose track record as a successful entrepreneur shows limited value creation for anyone other than himself.
To his fiercest detractors – and there are many— Ramaswamy is little more than a hyper-intelligent salesman, capable of using his lightning-quick brain to lure people into buying whatever he happens to be selling at the time.
The product could be an allegedly promising treatment for a brutal, mysterious disease or the notion that he is the next-generation Donald Trump, with an even more pointed approach to populist, grievance-based politics.
…“The truth is he goes for flamboyance and finding greater fools to buy into his illusions,” says the well-respected Yale Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who along with colleague Steven Tian has done extensive research into Ramaswamy’s career.
Sonnenfeld, who is the founder of the Yale Leadership Institute, and Tian have looked at Ramaswamy's biotech and hedge fund records and have repeatedly brought new information to light in Fortune magazine columns.
“[Ramaswamy] always hops out at the top and leaves his investors behind as an enterprise collapses,” Sonnenfeld tells The Messenger. "Now he is trying to make a new business by being ‘Mr. Anti-Woke.’ And he never lets the truth get in the way.”
By far the most prominent effort— and biggest failure— in Ramaswamy’s business career came when his biotech company, Axovant Sciences, acquired rights to a potential drug to fight Alzheimer's disease.
Axovant was a brand-new company. And beyond an undergraduate degree in biology, Ramaswamy had no experience in pharmaceutical research or any further scientific training. The drug was called Intepirdine, and the $34.6 billion pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, having given up on the drug's prospects, sold it to Axovant for $5 million and other considerations.
Ramaswamy rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange in June of 2015— alongside his new bride— when Axovant became the biggest-ever biotech IPO at the time, raising $315 million and eventually winning a valuation of $3 billion.
Intepirdine had been promoted by Ramaswamy to Axovant investors as a potential game-changer for a debilitating disease that has defied any type of cure and often made life heart-breaking for tens of millions of the elderly and their families around the world.
It failed miserably.
The drug showed little benefit in clinical trials and the Federal Drug Administration declined to approve it. Axovant shares collapsed, plummeting by 70 percent in 2017 following the clinical trial failure.
Ramaswamy told Forbes magazine that it was the “single greatest failure” of his career.
As he has allowed on the campaign trail, Ramaswamy's fortunes took a hit as Axovant sank to penny-stock status. But he wasn't burned as badly as many other investors.
Ramaswamy’s holding company, Roivant Sciences (the ROI is short for “return on investment”), raised $500 million during the Axovant frenzy.
And by the time Axovant crashed, Ramaswamy had reduced Roivant’s stake in the startup from 75 percent to 28 percent, according to research by Sonnenfeld and Tian at Yale.
Axovant made Ramaswamy a very rich man for the first time, despite the company having just a handful of employees, two of whom were his mother and brother, at the time of its IPO.
Ramaswamy’s 2015 tax return shows a capital gain of $37 million, the first of two major windfalls in his career that have thus far provided the money for his upstart presidential campaign.
…[T]he sale netted enough money to afford Ramaswamy the ability to self-fund at least some of his campaign. Of course, relying on his own cash could change as Ramaswamy solicits money.
Ramaswamy has so far raised $1.6 million from small-dollar donors, a relatively small number but higher than some other more established candidates. And the effort has just begun.
According to figures in the Tampa Bay Times, Ramaswamy's campaign had around $9 million in the bank near the end of August following a loan of $15 million from the candidate himself.
While Axiovant failed, most of Ramaswamy’s stake remained in Roivant, a venture funded in part by QVT, his former hedge fund employer. QVT now calls itself a "family office" rather than a hedge fund and owns the largest stake in Roivant, as well as holdings in a Chinese healthcare company and a rare-earth company that is about 7.7 percent Chinese-owned.
Ramaswamy has staked out a China policy significantly different -- and less aggressive -- than some of his GOP opponents. In a testy interview with John Roberts of Fox News last week, Ramaswamy defended his stance that he would only fully back Taiwan against a Chinese invasion until the U.S. is no longer dependent on Taiwanese semiconductors. After that, he said, he would resume a policy of “strategic ambiguity," which means no longer making any explicit guarantee that the U.S. would defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression.
In 2015, Ramaswamy boasted that Roivant would be “the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry.”
It did not exactly turn out that way.
Roivant did, however, lead to the second giant payout that padded Ramaswamy’s wealth. In 2019, Roviant sold its stake in five spinoff companies to Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo. Ramaswamy’s 2020 tax return shows a capital gain of $176 million, accounting for much of his current liquid net worth. The deal itself was valued at $1 billion.
Roivant went public through a Special Purpose Acquisition Vehicle (SPAC) transaction in 2021. That route comes with strict rules on when and how much Ramaswamy can sell of his 7 percent holding in the publicly traded company, which has been valued at between $100 million-$500 million depending on its volatile stock price. In February of this year, Ramaswamy sold 4 million shares in the company netting him an additional $24 million.
Roivant, like many of Ramaswamy's ventures, has never turned anything close to a profit, losing around $2 billion between 2020 and 2022, with another billion-dollar loss expected for 2023.
…Ramaswamy has come under heavy attack for accepting a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans to help cover the cost of his Yale Law School education following graduation from Harvard.
Ramaswamy, the son of Indian Hindu immigrant parents, has said on the campaign trail that he would support at least a temporary ban on "birthright citizenship," the constitutionally enshrined right to citizenship of those born on American soil to immigrant parents.
It has been reported that Ramaswamy paid to have the reference to the Fellowship for New Americans removed from his Wikipedia page. The late Paul Soros was the older brother of George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist and supporter of progressive causes whose name alone enrages much of the GOP base.
There are also multiple lawsuits involving Ramaswamy and his various companies. A case in federal court alleges that Moderna, developer of one of the first COVID-19 vaccines, infringed on patents owned by Roivant. Moderna has countered that it was able to do that because of an order issued under former President Trump during his Operation Warp Speed.
In his book, Woke, Inc, Ramaswamy writes positively of notorious "pharma bro" Martin Shkreli, who went to prison for securities fraud and whose business model included acquiring the patents to drugs and then jacking up the price by enormous amounts. Shkreli was released from federal prison last May.
“What was Martin Shkreli really guilty of?,” Ramaswamy asks in the book. “Why did the DOJ go after him so hard, when it lets others quietly get away with much worse?" Ramaswamy was also at times critical of Shkreli in the book and in subsequent interviews.
Ramaswamy and his asset-management firm Strive, which seeks to push back against so-called "woke" investing that takes into account a company's governance structure as well as its record on environmental and social justice issues, is also under legal threat.
The firm, which just surpassed $1 billion in total assets spread across multiple Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), is facing a suit from an employee who claims she was pressured to violate securities laws. The employee, Joyce Rosely of New Jersey, contends that Ramaswamy directed her to "violate applicable securities laws and participate in the decision to terminate [Rosely] when she refused to participate."
