The Dodgy Doge of Efficiency
'Science' entrepreneur and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy seems most notable for his bombast and self-enrichment rather than any discernible talent for running a tight ship
Like his new boss’s business credentials, Vivek Ramaswamy’s brand image as a savvy tech entrepreneur with a magic touch is largely a television construct.
Donald John Trump sold the country on his chops as a tough real-estate mogul by playing one on a reality TV show. Ramaswamy burst to prominence by impersonating a new-generation tech leader in Republican primary debates in 2023.
While neither one measures up to their marketplace-genius hype, Trump has now shown himself to have staying power as a savvy political showman and canny exploiter of the grievance-heavy American zeitgeist. Ramaswamy, meanwhile, remains stuck in hustler-on-the-make mode.
Still, there he was on Thursday traipsing around Capitol Hill with his partner, Elon Scissorhands — the two Doges of efficiency — chatting up members of Congress and building support the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. (DOGE isn’t really a department; it is more of an advisory group charged with wringing waste out of Washington.)
But the Trump initiative, with roots in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, from which the President-elect distanced himself from during the campaign, is being taken oh-so-seriously by MAGA munchkins on the Hill even though Musk’s modus operandi has been to slash, burn, and try to repair later (see his Twitter/X debacle). Ramaswamy’s record as an operational executive and an honest broker seems even more problematic.
Soros fellow. Early in the run-up to the Election of 2024, Ramaswamy was a shiny, new player in GOP-land, making a great deal of noise in the primary debates (which Trump boycotted) as the voice of a younger generation. Then he got his ears clipped in an angry exchange with Nikki Haley, who muttered that he was “human scum” after he brought up her young daughter in an exchange over TikTok, and his candidacy began to fade.
While Ramaswamy was having his first 15 minutes, I asked the late Ben White, my colleague at the now-defunct Messenger, to assess his track record as a businessman. I worked with Ben on the story over a long week and weekend.
Long bio short, Ramaswamy is a child of Indian immigrants. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in biology and Yale Law (with help from a Soros Family fellowship, a fact he later tried to have scrubbed from his Wiki page) and went on to work for the hedge fund QVT, which has now re-positioned itself as a family office.
Seven years later, with help from QVT, Ramaswamy started a pharma company, Roivant Sciences, that tried to breathe new life into drugs that had failed to pass Federal Drug Administration muster. One such venture was an effort to revive Intepirdine, a Alzheimer's treatment abandoned by GlaxoSmithKline and sold to Roivant for $5 million.
No bell-ringer. The drug became the much ballyhooed centerpiece of a Roivant spin-off, Axovant Sciences, which Ramaswamy took public. In June 2015, he rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, and Axovant became the biggest-ever biotech IPO at the time: It raised $315 million and was eventually valued at $3 billion.
By 2017, after the FDA declined to approve Intepirdine, Axovant shares nose-dived 70 percent in what Ramaswamy told Forbes was the “single greatest failure” of his career. Investors were badly burned as Axovant headed downhill to penny-stock-land, but Ramaswamy had insulated himself from total immolation. Before the dumpster fire, he had pared back Roivant’s stake in Axovant from 75 percent to 25 percent, cashing out with a payday of almost $40 million, according to research by Yale Management Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and his colleague Steven Tian.
“The truth is [that Ramaswamy] goes for flamboyance and finding greater fools to buy into his illusions,” Sonnenfeld, a senior associate dean and the founder of the Yale Leadership Institute, told White.
In a commentary for Fortune reprinted in Yale Insights in September 2023, Sonnenfeld referred to Ramaswamy as the “court jester of corporate governance…[about whom] I have repeatedly cleared the diversionary smoke he deploys by revealing the reality of his pump-and-dump business playbook. Now Ramaswamy seems to have retrofitted it for politics.”
An effort to contact Sonnenfeld for his opinion on Ramaswamy’s fitness to wring waste and excess out of the federal government was unsuccessful.
Ties to China. Another curious fact about Ramaswamy is that he has railed against U.S. companies transferring critical data to China (see the YouTube video above) and previously called co-Doge Musk a puppet of Beijing. “Tesla is increasingly beholden to China. I have no reason to think Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need.” Ramaswamy said in 2023.
However, Ramaswamy has his own deep financial ties to China. QVT, the investment firm that backed Roivant and is its second-largest shareholder, has significant interests in the Chinese healthcare company iKang. Ramaswamy steeped down as chairman of Roivant in 2023 to run for President but remains its sixth-largest shareholder.
One of QVT’s other four prime holdings is a stake in the American rare-earths company MP Materials, whose rah-rah-U.S. website bills itself as the only scalable alternative to Chinese imports. MP’s mission statement says: “Without the consistent and trusted supply provided by MP Materials, the entire supply chain for critical magnetic materials has shifted to Asia, primarily China. MP Materials serves as the beachhead for a renaissance in domestic manufacturing. It starts with us.
“Without our consciously-mined materials, not only will the future growth of ‘green’ technologies depend on highly-pollutant supply from China, but our advanced R&D and manufacturing will continue to follow that supply overseas. MP Materials is restoring the U.S.’s resource independence….”
However, according to Yahoo! Finance, MP’s second-largest shareholder, with a 7.7% stake, is the $18 billion Chinese state-controlled rare-earths company Shenghe Resources Holding Co., which trades on the Shanghai stock exchange.
There is little argument that Washington agencies need radical reform and a firm hand on spending, especially when it comes to defense — the troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program targeted by Musk will cost American taxpayers almost $2 trillion, according to the Government Accounting Office, and the Navy’s disastrous Littoral Combat Ship has been soaking up billions for more than 20 years.
But is Ramaswamy even remotely qualified to bring some sense and prudence to the Pentagon and other drunkenly-spending government agencies mired in the revolving-door, political-fief-ridden culture of Washington?
For it-takes-a-thief thinkers, maybe the answer is yes. But a dash of integrity might be reassuring. As Sonnenfeld wrote in 2023: “[Ramaswamy] always hops out at the top and leaves his investors behind as an enterprise collapses…. And he never lets the truth get in the way.”
The Russians Aren't Coming. They're Here
America’s once-again Commander-in-Chief gravitates toward political players who have a soft spot for our fiercest enemy. Why?
Apparently, America’s long obsession with Soviet Union commies undermining the republic and Russian operatives and hackers infiltrating our government is disappearing faster than Bashar al-Assad and the UnitedHealthcare killer.
How else to explain the emergence of Moscow apologists and fellow-travelers as prospective members of the incoming Trump Administration, with at least one nominated to head what is among the most sensitive posts in the nation?
Well, maybe there is another explanation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. A Special Prosecutor investigation concluded that collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign was a hoax.
That’s the truth if you believe Truth Social.
The real truth is considerably more nuanced.
As then Attorney General Bill Barr, a conflicted Trump appointee and now full-fledged weasel, wrote as he declined to release the entire report by the timid Robert Mueller: “While this report does not conclude that the President [Trump] committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him [of obstruction of justice].”
In a Foreign Policy story last October titled “ The Enduring Mystery of Trump’s Relationship with Russia,” Michael Hirsh wrote: “After years of investigations by U.S. government bodies from the Justice Department to the FBI to Congress, the American public has no idea if Russian President Vladimir Putin has ‘something’ on Trump….”
“Eight years after the FBI first began probing Trump’s Russia connections in mid-2016, national security officials are still puzzled by the former U.S. president’s unrelenting deference to Putin, as well as the enduring mystery of Trump’s decades-old relationship with Russian and former Soviet investors and financiers, some of whom helped save his failing businesses years ago.”
While there is no answer to the Trump-Russia riddle — yet — what would motivate the President-elect of the United States to surround himself with potentially compromised players such as his Russia-born close advisor Boris Epshteyn, who proposed himself as a special envoy to Moscow; his choice for FBI director, Kashyap “Kash” Patel, who sought to discredit the investigation into collusion with Russia; and a Putin groupie and former politician with no national security credentials who is now the nominee for Director of National Intelligence (DNI)?
The latter, of course, would be Tulsi Gabbard, an ex-representative from Hawaii, failed 2020 presidential candidate, and onetime Bernie Sanders supporter. Gabbard, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, endorsed Trump this year and switched allegiance from the Democratic to Republican Party.
Gabbard has justified Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine; met with Moscow’s newest resident, the Syrian émigré butcher Bashar al-Assad, and expressed doubts about his use of chemical weapons on his own people; and allegedly spread Russian misinformation. She would oversee 18 intelligence agencies and departments.
Failed presidential candidate and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has said of Gabbard “This is not a place for a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer.”
But what does Vladie think?
My Book Report
By Deidre Depke
Maybe I Should Construct My Own Best-of List
I spend a lot of time thinking about books — reading reviews, paying attention to what’s new, listening to NPR’s author interviews. That’s why I often find best-of lists baffling. Why have I missed so many of the critics’ fiction favorites?
Take The New York Times’ 10 best books of the year. I’ve read exactly one from the fiction list of five — the brilliant James by Percival Everett. As you undoubtedly know by now, James is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the runaway slave.
I’ve got two on the New Yorker list — James again and Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red, the story of a love triangle set in the sugar beet farming community of North Dakota’s Red River Valley.
Of the major prizes, James took the National Book Award. The Pulitzer went to Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips. I’ve read that one! It’s a disturbing historical novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Booker was won by Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, a novel that takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. Sorry to say I missed it.
I’m certain the fault lies with me: no doubt these are excellent novels by fantastic writers. With that in mind, I’m making my way through some of these fiction standouts — at least until the probable top titles of 2025 hit bookstore shelves.
That ambition led me to Held, a novel by Anne Michaels that made the Booker short list. Michaels was Toronto’s poet laureate from 2015 to 2019, and the lyrical writing is poetic indeed. The story spans four generations of the 20th century, beginning on a First World War battlefield in France. John, a young soldier, lies grievously injured in the aftermath of an attack. “Mist smouldered like cremation fires in the rain,” Michaels writes, foreshadowing, of course, another world-wide battle yet to come.
This novel is less narrative than meditation — about war, trauma, tyranny, and their effects on the future. “The past exists as a present moment,” Michaels writes. Held isn’t an easy book. But for those who prize fine writing, Michaels’ novel is transcendent.
Next up (maybe): All Fours by Miranda July. It’s a novel that appears on every serious list of 2024 top books. The apparently sexually explicit All Fours follows a married mother and artist who derails a solo cross-country road trip by checking into a motel close to home and starting an affair with a younger rental-car worker. The Times describes it as “the first great perimenopause novel.” That sounds notable to me.
Dear Subscribers:
Illness forced The Constant Tribune to skip publication last week and be tardy this week. Our sincere apologies.
— The Management
Here's to "flamboyance and finding greater fools to buy into his illusions." Nice work, Ciro. Restacking.