Vivek Ramaswamy, an Indian American Republican nicknamed the “CEO of Anti-Woke Inc.” by the New Yorker magazine, is apparently considering running for President of the United States in 2024.
Ramaswamy, who was born in Cincinnati to Indian immigrant parents, attended Yale and Harvard before becoming a successful biotech entrepreneur.
He has also authored a book titled “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Deception” and is currently said to be worth more than $500 million.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a conservative entrepreneur, announced his presidential run in a Wall Street Journal editorial on Tuesday, stating, “America is in the middle of a national identity crisis.”
“To put America first, we need to rediscover what America is. That’s why I am running for president,” Ramaswamy said. “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.”
According to his bio page on Strive.com, the Ohio native built multiple multibillion-dollar IT and health care companies after graduating with honors from Harvard and obtaining his law degree from Yale.
“It may appear presumptuous for a 37-year-old political outsider to seek for the highest office in the land, but I am running on a vision for our country—one that restores merit in every sector of American life,” Ramaswamy stated in his announcement.
We’ve celebrated our “diversity” so much that we forgot all the ways we’re really the same as Americans, bound by ideals that united a divided, headstrong group of people 250 years ago. I believe deep in my bones those ideals still exist. I’m running for President to revive them. pic.twitter.com/bz5Qtt4tmm
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) February 22, 2023
Ramaswamy has been outspoken in his opposition to companies using their platforms for social causes, and he has echoed the views of many far-right Republicans that America’s values are deteriorating, citing critical race theory and self-victimization as factors that have eroded the country’s once-shared identity.
In his editorial, Ramaswamy called for securing the border, eliminating affirmative action “across the American economy,” and declaring economic independence from China, which he calls “the greatest external threat to America.”
Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, published in 2021, and Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Way Back to Excellence, published in 2022, expanded on his viewpoints.
Ramaswamy is the latest politician to declare his campaign in the Republican primary, following former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s announcement last Tuesday.
Haley, 51, was the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations under former President Donald Trump from January 2017 to December 2018. Trump, 76, announced his own presidential bid in 2024 during a speech at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, in November.